Rough Justice(1926)

I I

j DELHI UNIVERSITY j
LIBRARY

DELHI UNIVERSITY UBRARY

No. 0:3>my:f

■No. 377<</3

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below. An overdue charge of one
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or beft celhe date last stamped
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THE

THOENIX LIBR.ARr

*

ROUGH JUST CE

A list

of further titles in the Phoenix Library,
in fuohich other njoorks by C. E. Montague appear,
twill be found at the end
of this book

ROUGH JUSTICE

*By

C. E. MONTAGUE

CHATTO AND WINDUS
LONDON

First published March 1926
Ninth printing February 1930
First issued in the Phoenix Library
1929 j reprinted 1930, 1938

Printed in Great Britain : all rights reserved

To

THE MEMORY OF

F. F. M.

WHO DIED ON

October 30, 1925

BOOK ONE

CHAPTER 1

I

T hough Aubemn was on y about to be born to
Thomas and Winifred Gartl , there was already one
bundle of mottled pink flesi and white wool and
blue overalls rising and falling and tumbling about on the
sunburnt lawn of the Chantry, their house by the Thames.

This energetic person was Mollr; and she, too, was a
Garth, though not near akin to her guardian Thomas, the
last of many Thomas and Auberon Garths to own this
agreeable dwelling. Three years had passed since a foot
light-heartedly placed on a step imperfectly cut on the iced
Brenva Ridge of Mont Blanc had slipped out of that step.
This lapse had extinguished both Molly’s parents together.
A gifted lawyer had tried to make out that Molly’s mother
had had time to inherit the very small wealth of her husband,
under his will; that she had enjoyed its possession for quite
a few seconds, and then died intestate. But how could you
tell? No one had seen the young couple finished except
their two Courmayeur guides, and these were killed too.
Anyhow, from first to last, a minute had sufficed to make
the infant Molly an orphan in the most liberal sense of the
word. The state of the bodies showed that.

During that minute Thomas and Winifred Garth had
been sunk fathoms deep in a mystic joy that was flooding
their honeymoon month in the neighbouring Valais. The
two were quite unpractically tender in conscience as well
as in heart; so the news that reached them in the murmurous
cool of a fine midsummer twilight, under the cherry-trees
of Vissoye, came like a reproachful summons: Molly, the
tiny third cousin at home, became, as it were, a frail gong on
which a brute blow had been struck to call them away from

» F

2

ROUGH JUSTICE

a felicity too solely their own. Away they posted, over the
main ridge of the Alps, to bury the unrecognisable dead and
to provide for the wailing families of the guides, and then
home to England, to patch tip, as well as they could, the
world that had come to pieces under the unconscious Molly.

They carried her off, to keep as their own, and Molly,
a good-humoured soul, seemed to bless this arrangement by
beaming upon them at sight. Bereaved too soon to pick up
any mawkish tricks of self-pity, she had gone cheerfully on,
ever since, with the tall enterprise of life; she had ruled her
adoptive parents, upon the whole, justly and clemently;
though she might still be too young to size up her new
home in a critical spirit, she bore it at least the great love
that any young foal full of health will bear to any field that
it is used to.

II

It was a goodly abode, if you were not fussy about a few
fogs in winter and flies in hot summers, nor wedded too much
to the latest fashions in “ sporting estates ” and “ good social
neighbourhoods.” It was a small Tudor mansion of mottled
red brick, built just about 1550, and time and the weather
had worked on it well; like old wine and old paintings, its
walls had the deep-hearted glow that has to be slowly
amassed — a. sort of savings put patiently by, out of many
years’ income of sunshine. More door and window than
wall, the river front of the house lay as open as summer
itself on the midsummer day of Auberon’s birth: house and
garden grew into each other; indoors and out, you got the
good of them both; you passed, without any sense of a
break, from rooms that smelt of roses more than the garden
itself, out to a terrace more cheerfully littered with papers
and books than the rooms you had left. Winifred Garth
had left them as they lay, to take to her bed.

As the house melted into the garden, the garden melted

BOOK ONE

3

into wide England beyond. Over t\ e low brick wall at the
riverside edge of the lawn, seeds of the gardeners’ flowers
had blown out for centuries, autumn by autumn, on to the
tussocky outer turf that the tide w itered twice daily; so
there was no rigid frontier, with sur flowers all on one side
and marsh-marigolds all on the other. House and garden,
garden and foreshore, the old and mgust thoroughfare of
the Thames and the green stretch oi Surrey beyond it were
all members one of another.

The house stood at an elbow and looked, up and down,
along two of the highest tidal reaches of Thames. Thomas
Garth looked numbly up and dowri them during his vigil
of torment and fear in the garden that Winifred had left.
Up stream, among trees, there lay all that is left to this day
of the house where, they say. Queen Elizabeth died. Black
against the sky in the north-east there stood the big lion
passant aloft on the roof of the cubical monkish palace to
which Charles the Second fled from the Plague. The elms
that walled the north end of the garden rooted among the
stones of one of the votive chantries that Henry the Fifth,
as he is reported by Shakespeare, cannily mentioned to God
in his prayers before Agincourt: Garth’s house itself had
taken its name from some old connection with one of these
disestablished houses of prayer, and he would cheerfully have
sold his all to found another to-day if he could have hoped
that God ever took tips to make you top dog in a fight or to
see your wife safely through childbirth. No good; nothing
for it but waiting and gazing, with eyes that saw nothing at
all, at the shining highway at the foot of the garden, where
Lady Jane Grey had gone down on the ebb to the Tower
and Dr. Johnson had come up on the top of the tide to dine
with Mr. Cambridge at Richmond. Over the flat square
mile of meadow beyond the river, once marsh and then
deer-park and now grazed by horses and sheep, black-

4 ROUGH JUSTICE

haired primitive man from the Mediterranean and yellow-
haired primitive man from the Elbe had picked their way in
turn, each full of magnificent hopes, towards the great ford
of Thames a mile lower down stream. Everything here
was scrolled and emblazoned with ancientry. Garth
had loved, all his life, that quality of the place. But
what was the good ,of it now — and Winifred dying,
perhaps?

Perhaps there really was, apart from this lover’s fears, a
delicate smell of death — at any rate, of unsuccess — about the
dignified landscape before him. Whatever figure this parish
of Gistleham, once the Domesday manor or vill of that
name, had once cut in the world, it was all over now. For
about a century past it had been losing slowly the stir of
life at full pressure. Progress seemed to have missed this
part of the Thames when she whirled past, a short mile
away to the north, along the Great West Road and, later,
the Great Western Railway. Scarcely ten miles lay between
the Garths’ house and mid- London. The city’s glow
showed turbidly red, of a night, on the under side of the
clouds. But the hum of life that used to be heard from the
Chantry lawn by old Auberon Garth, father of Thomas,
had long been sinking. It was the second time this had
happened, but now it sank more gently than it had done
when a Norman king who liked a little shooting converted
the Saxon village into a part of his new deer-forest of Staines.
Fashion had carried the pleasure-boats off to the more
affluent waters above the first lock. The big Georgian inn,
“ The London Apprentice,” faced appealingly down stream
towards the faithless capital, its name commemorating the
vanished jollities of distant generations of city youth in its
now empty chambers. Gistleham had decayed with the
old barge traffic up river from London. Each year the
leisurely rumble and dip of big sculls came at longer intervals

BOOK ONE

5

to the ear from the public ferry j ist above the Chantry
garden; and each year it was rarer to hear the little dry
rattle of stone upon wood as road meral was slowly unloaded
by hand from a barge into a cart at tiie village wharf, which
was now too large for its work.

“Just the place for the Garths,’’ Colin March used to
say — and he was a cousin of th irs: he should know.
“Thomas Garth is the one authent c Conservative still left
in Britain. He’s like the only surviving wild cat in the
Highlands. All the Garths were like that, I believe. The
one poor, Whiggish thing they ever did was to plant that
great beech on their lawn — new-fangled sort of a tree —
only brought in by the Romans. No doubt it was the
unpopular thing to do at the time — so they did it. They
have been keeping their eyes off the main chance — cutting
it dead — since history started. They wouldn’t turn Pro-
testant under Henry the Eighth, lest he should give them an
abbey and beeves; they waited till they were sure to get
into trouble by doing it temp, James the Second. I fancy
they built this house on the river so as to keep a watch on
the tides — lest they should ever take one at the flood and be
led on to fortune.”

Colin talks like that. You mustn’t mind him. Any-
how, however much Garth liked the beautiful place which
had not done very well for itself in these times, it did him
no good now — perhaps it made him ache worse, like still
sunshine on some day when you bury a friend.

Ill

Garth as she was, Molly could not be reasonably charged
at that moment with any insensate love of the past. At a
yellow-barred nursery window above, her face appeared now
and then, grave, excited and restless. I fancy her whole
soul was plunging freely into the future. She was to “ have

6 ROUGH JUSTICE

a brother” — for Nurse appeared to have settled already the
sex of this expected immigrant.

Of course that was a rousing year altogether, if you were
still pretty young at the time. All old and worn-out things
were being swept out of the way at a quite breathless pace.
Almost unthinkable marvels of daring and wit were adding
extra oxygen to the air we all breathed. Music-halls and
universities were drumming with the deep reverberations of
“ Ta-ra-ra-^<9^w-de-ay,” that j oiliest of tunes, the last word
of youth’s happy contempt for the deafness of age to the
clear and loud call of life. A choir of young poets, tremend-
ous fellows, were drinking themselves to death, with great
devotion, lest some movement worthy of the name of Decad-
ence should fail to signalise the deathbed of a century. The
safety bicycle had just descended from Heaven, to make
women free of the road. For the first time in history Scots
were permitting the amateur champion at golf to come into
being upon a course not in Scotland. It was a prince of
years — all changes and stir.

And yet — well, the greatness of an event is said to reside
in the mind of him, or her, who is stirred by it. If so,
comets certainly ought to have blazed in the midnight sky
above Molly’s cot on the Midsummer Eve which was the
eve, too, of Auberon’s advent. As for Thomas and Winifred
Garth the gold boom and the death of the Prince and the
general election itself paled down to nothing beside the great
nativity. It was to them a re-beginning of time, a re-birth
of themselves. For they were simple; they longed naively
for their first-born; it never occurred to their minds to
take their promotion to parenthood as either a nuisance or
a trifle.

IV

In Molly’s bosom hope and desire may well have been
flecked with some doubts not easily dismissible. How big

BOOK ONE

7

would the new comrade be? And oi what temper? What
line would he take, on the great issues? That of a leal true
ally? Or that of a Claude Barbason, who had come to tea
on Molly’s last birthday and, after th^^ meal, had grabbed all
Molly’s toys and then sat inert in a corner, hoarding the
spoil and glowering darkly, sated th possession and yet
joyless, a grim enigma to the friendL and ingenuous owner
of the sequestrated property? Hope and anxiety fought
visibly in her flushed face when at last she was led into
Mother’s room, to inspect the recruit.

Disappointment, at that age, is past all disguising. How
is Hope to keep her countenance when her whole face has
just been battered in? Molly came and saw, and the sight
conquered her. Doubtless she had expected too much —
had looked for a lad of inches, parts and mettle, fit from the
first to jump in, as they say, and take hold; a red hand in
the foray upon the big strawberry- bed ; a counsellor sage
to assist in maturing Molly’s darling scheme for climbing up
into the little copper beech-tree in the meadow and then
dropping, all astride, from a convenient bough on to the
bare back of the Shetland pony as he grazed. Vain hope!
The chimeras that we pursue!

The recruit was deplorable. Quantity, quality, every-
thing was lacking. Molly warily touched with the tip of
one finger the swarthy red skin of the comatose and damp-
haired animalcule. Then she snatched the finger away. It
had not been burned. That was something. But oh the
limitations of the creature! Molly felt about for its feet,
through that futile imposture, its very long robe. Worse
and worse! Its wretched legs came down hardly any
distance at all. “ Having a brother! ” So that was all it
came to!

Molly looked so tragi-comic that Winifred Garth — then
lying back, all slack and spent, on two pillows, her face

8 ROUGH JUSTICE

transparent with exhaustion and yet radiant with mere rest
from pain and with another beatitude less definable — smiled
at her ward fondly while tears of weakness and sympathy
filled her own eyes, always the kindest that you can imagine.
She was amazingly beautiful just then, with the transfigura-
tion upon her that some women happy in their love and their
motherhood show at such times. “ Oh, Mollikin, don’t
mind so much,” she pleaded. “ Kiss me and, please, please,
don’t be disappointed. I know he isn’t big, but he will
grow, ever so much.”

Molly melted helplessly at this, and they lay face to face
for a good while, with the baby between them, in some sort
of silent communion of mutual tenderness and compre-
hension. Then Molly had to go. Mother’s nurse declaring
firmly that now she must rest. “ I s’pose,” Molly said at
the door, mastering firmly the painfulness of this thought,
“ he’ll have his breakfas’ here in your room every morning
for kite a long time.”

There was no gainsaying it

V

One fire, we are told, drives out another’s burning.
During the next few weeks the mind of Molly seemed to be
serving as a theatre for one of these dramas of expulsion.
Presently her first ardour of disappointment appeared to be
losing ground. Some less obviously reasonable flame was
presumably winning the day. Molly became pensive, for
whole minutes at a time. After one of these passages of
thought she would ask her nurse, without saying to whom
she referred, “ Is he poor? ” Whatever the answer might
be, Molly would then subside into reverie. Thence she
would sometimes emerge, later on, with the interjection,
“ Poor baby! ” breathed in a tone of deepest commiseration.
At last she fairly avowed to Mrs. Garth the revolution that

BOOK ONE

0

was now completed in her bosom “ I don’ know,” she
said, “ what makes me feel sorry for Baby. I always feel ’s
if he had somefing a-matter wif hiniu ’S if he wanted some
food an’ couldn’t get it, or somefing/’

There was really as little the matter with Auberon as
there was with the infant Bacchus, if sculptors tell us the
truth. Auberon had the massed goc 4 health of two thorough-
bred stocks in neither of which had :nen or women lived quite
softly or defiled the temple. He .iid with all his soul the
whole duty of babies; he fed and slept with a will; he only
cried so far as, at that time of life, to cry is a form of gym-
nastics or else the lawful ringing of a bell; in his bath he made
the leg stroke of a frog with a verve that dissipated any doubt
in the minds of Winifred and Thomas about the aquatic
origin of man; when awake on the Chantry lawn, where
he lived most of the day, sucking in air and light like a plant,
he adored, with mighty chucklings and kickings of joy,
thanks and praise, the soughing sound of the big beech, the
poplars and the oaks, the muted roar of the distant weir,
the dancing chequer-work of sunlight and shadow among
blown boughs, the doings of birds and the faces of friends
who looked down into his pram. Whatever nature might
prompt Molly to fear, it was well with the child.

VI

Not until three years later did Molly’s craving to mother
the lesser creature get its grand chance. By that time
Auberon was putting the tongue of Shakespeare and Milton
to fairly free, if inexact, use. The lyric impulse of these
masters, also, seemed to be moving him on the lovely last
evening of June 1895, when he was lying flat on his back,
in his mother’s lap, after his bath. Naked and flushed all
over with his own blossoming health and the level sunshine
that let itself in through the tassels and leaves of wisteria and

10

ROUGH JUSTICE

vine that framed the nursery’s western window, he fell to
crooning up at the shining love in her face a birdlike over-
flow of rhythmic contentment:

“For Muvs is vevvy dear
And val-loo-abble to me.”

At this the beautiful woman bending over him lost all
control of the pain that infests the ecstasies of mothers. All
of them, I suppose, are Madonnas; they live in the shadow
of apprehended crucifixions. “ Oh, Bron, Bron, my little
son,” she wailed, snatching him up in her arms to press him
close to her breast, and rocking her chair in a way that,
somehow, was like a wringing of hands. “To think that
one day you’ll be big, and then you won’t want to lie on my
lap any more! ” It was all slipping away, the delight of
having him tiny, the sight of his little green cap in the
garden. Nobody else would ever love him enough when he
was a man, and then worse times and worse would come,
till some day he would lie on a bed, an old man and sick, and
she not there, and no one able to reach him, shut up alone
with pain. Not only after the death of her children must
Rachel mourn; every year of their youth bereaves her of
some dear thing that they were.

“ Little babies! Little babies! ” Winifred said in a kind
of doting chant to her husband that night in the dark. “ The
feel of their skin! And the little smell! And the little
heave as they breathe! And all their little needs that call
to you ! ” Garth tried to soothe her with caresses. She
spoke almost wildly.

There were unusual sounds in the house the next morning
when Auberon went forth on his customary round, to inspect
the delicious contents of life, before breakfast. And — more
disturbing still — some usual sounds were not there. His
mother, early up as a rule, was not to be seen. Nurse was

BOOK ONE

n

furtively crying and said that Mt ther was ill. Auberon
caught sight of his father far off ai d ran back to Nurse in
alarm. “ What’s the matter with J ahva? ” he asked. “ His
face is so small ! ”

VII

Auberon was never exactly told what had happened, in so
many words. But there was Mol y’s face to read, as well
as the pinched and sunken one he had seen on his father.
The white torment in these must l ave worked on Auberon
pretty strongly. For, half-way through the first mid-day
meal without Mother, he climbed ciown from his chair, like
one urged by he could not tell what, walked round the table
and, straining up on tiptoe, hugged each of the other two
tightly round the neck with both arms and no words at all.

A strange thing was that they both seemed to be more
sorry for him than for any one else. Molly whispered
thickly, “ I’ll do every single thing 1 can. I promise.” His
father, not a profuse dealer in endearments, gathered Auberon
into his arms convulsively, saying nothing, but stroking the
child’s hair very hard, with a kind of fierce fondness. Auberon
had to look away from his father’s face; its control of itself
was too dreadful.

Only yesterday Garth had come hurrying home from a
week in the North, where he had a seat to defend in the
elections raging that summer. As he came leaping, three at
a time, up the shallow white steps to the door, Auberon had
stood expectant at the top and, postponing his own embraces,
had said in a benignant tone of fatherly understanding, “ Go
into the dlaw’n’-room, Fahva. You’ll find Muvva there.”
Now she had died in her sleep, without word or cry.

CHAPTER II

I

F or the fifteen years before his wife died, Garth had
been succeeding in lifej so most people said. But a
few had seen that there were seeds of failure lodged in
him too. And now his light was out; and many seeds, it
is known, will come up well in the dark.

Many good things had been his from the start — good birth
and looks and manners, the will to work hard, money enough
to give him his choice of work, but not enough to keep him
employed as the flustered Chancellor of a gross private
Exchequer. He had brains too, and had used to some pur-
pose the keys that public schools and ancient universities
leave lying about, in a casual way, before the toddling feet
of their nurslings, to pick up or to leave, as they choose. He
had travelled, and found out for himself what men have done
in the arts, and he had grasped the idea of history. So he
had come to see civilisation, the real thing, face to face —
not the dead word that we use lifelessly, but the living
magnificent figure everlastingly fighting its way through
wastes of sand and thorns, with eyes that appealed for help
to all the brave and clean-hearted.

Garth had believed, in his youth, that what is called “ public
life ” would give him his best chance of helping. At twenty-
six he had gained the liking of the House of Commons, a
senate not blind to personal worth, though it may care about
other things more. When his party came into power they
made him a Civil Lord of the Admiralty; then he had been
Under-Secretary for War; now, a few weeks after the death
of his wife, the party triumphed again and Garth was called
into the Holy of holies, the actual Cabinet Yet the best
tipsters were already ceasing to give him as a predestinate
Prime Minister,

12

BOOK ONE

*3

He was “ unsound,” so they would tell you; one couldn’t
depend on him. He had ambition, they said; but, like
Macbeth’s, it was not attended by quite the right type of
handmaidens. Once he had thrown up his job, and a good
one, on some fad that he had about *;iving fair play to a pack
of Dutch louts who had got in our way at the far end of the
earth. Another time he had clean lost the day in a debate —
lost it off his own bat — by bringing in^o the light an embarrass-
ing fact which the Opposition, like f »ols, had never noticed at
all. He apparently failed altogether to see the good fight as
it was — as a strife between a noble army of patriots and a
crew of puny dastards who pestered the patriots at their
work. He would speak as if each party, perhaps, had got
hold of something to which each of the others might pay too
little regard if it had everything its own way. Even the
Irish! Even Labour!

This failing had been noticed even before his wife was
removed to where crowns of laurel and palm could no longer
be laid in her lap. But from that incident onward the dazz-
ling future that men had predicted for Garth certainly
wheeled round, faster than ever, towards a position just
behind him. His party’s press took to writing him off as a
faineant, jibber or crank. Black looks from party leaders
were presently followed by frank wiggings, or attempts to
wig. “ But, damn him,” said John Basil, one of these
chieftains, “ it’s no easy job, I can promise you — telling off
Garth.”

The old diplomatist, Wynnant, to whom it was said,
laughed understandingly. “No? You begin to find out
how beastly good-looking he is, don’t you? ”

That really was a part of the trouble. Even in early
youth, Garth’s face had been of the lean and hardy school
of handsomeness; its regularity of structure showed up
strongly through its rather close-fitting vesture of flesh. It

14 ROUGH JUSTICE

was now growing tautly ascetic or Savonarolan. His black
hair grew in the thronging, curling and overlapping locks
that are common on old statues, but seem now to be
rare. Of late this puissant headpiece had put on a chaplet
of slight greyness, worn like a wreath tilted a little back
on the head. It looked hard-gotten, somehow; so did the
multitudinous small lines now congregating round Garth’s
eyes.

“ It isn’t only his looks,” said Basil. “ It’s that de-
vastatory simple way that he has of seeing a thing. It’s
right, and so you must do it — that’s all he can see. Isaiah
as enfant terrible. He’d scuttle whole civilisations, not to
say parties. And yet he isn’t a prig, confound him! If
only he were, you could sneer in his face and begin to feel
better. He’s utterly humble, inside, although he’s a Dies
Ira to look at.”

“ It’s a family curse,” said Wynnant. “ His father, old
Auberon Garth, was born a militant monk — Cato, Bayard,
Don Quixote, all muddled together — went out to fight with
Garibaldi — wasted his money on every mad cause he could
find. It was he that stuffed up Tom with this chivalry tosh.
And Tom’s wife, that has just died, was as bad, although
she looked like a Hebe by Titian.”

II

Nothing for it, at last, but to jettison this manifest Jonah.
The party did the thing in style, being sincerely fond of
him, as well as afraid. The lies given out from on high, as
to the cause of his resignation, were framed to do him all
imaginable honour. The peerage they offered was of a
grade higher than his Ministerial rank required. This was
safe, for they knew that he was not taking anything of the
sort. For the same adequate reason they offered him a large
political pensioa

BOOK ONE

*5

Plain hard work was all he wanted now, not lollypops nor
money to buy them. One of hi' notions was that the
national ship was carrying too ma ly passengers, too little
crew. Now that his own chosen w )rk was taken out of his
hands, it was bitter to feel that he \ id never made the right
start; he ought to have first learnt r. trade in his youth — the
law, commerce, anything — fitted h mself into the working
life of the country, made himself abl ^ to earn, at some job or
other, enough wages to keep him; every one, gentle or simple,
ought to do that; fail to do that and you had already begun
to lose caste; you were not giving your proofs; you were
one of the maggots inhabiting Britain’s cheese; you were
putting a sting of truth, so far as you could, into the Socialist
talk about parasites who lived on “ the workers.” Too late
now, perhaps, to walk a hospital or to read for the Bar. Still
he could throw up his seat in the House and fall to, for the
longest of hours, on some of the least voluptuous forms of
public service — the stodgy indispensable humdrum of local
government, routine committees, ploddingly useful enquiries
too dull for the Press to report.

His former colleagues cast a look his way, now and then,
half-amused and half-puzzled. “ King Arthur,” said Basil,
the next time he and Wynnant met, “ has got himself up as
municipal dustman.”

“ It’s Tom’s one wicked pride,” Lord Wynnant said, “ to
be a nobody.”

“ As if he ever could! ” said Basil.

Ill

Whenever the day’s dusty labours ended in time, the
widower would speed off home like a carrier-pigeon released:
he wanted to reconstruct for the two children whatever
fragment he could of their old delight of “ coming down to
the drawing-room ” daily for the last hour before bath and

i6 ROUGH JUSTICE

bed. It was then that their mother had read to them,
played games on the floor, or sung nursery rhymes at the
big piano, Auberon sitting straight up on her knee, rapt
with the divine sounds, and Molly snuggling close on a
minute wicker chair.

The failure of this endeavour was almost as flat as that
which had crowned the larger politics of the prentice enter-
tainer. Singing or playing upon the piano was out of
Garth’s power. So he tried reading stories aloud. The
children were nice about it; but signs thickened that even
the best beloved of fables, when read out by him, were no
longer quite the old thing.

By way of amends he tried to strike out a line of his own.
Going down on all-fours, he gave representations of lions
and tigers, roaring and leaping about among the formalised
Persian flora of the drawing-room carpet. This went fairly
well for a time, at any rate as a relief for a public
jaded with Garth’s ineffective rendering of the nursery
sagas. Auberon would uplift his voice softly during a pause
in the tale about the Glass Hill: “ Fahva, when you’ve
finissed zis story, will you, please, be a wild beast? ” The
story, with less interpretative magic than ever to help it,
would lumber on to its next pause. But then, “ Oh, Fahva,
be a lion to me now,” Auberon appealed. Before the
story’s end it was almost a wail of “Fahva, I’m tired
of you not being a beast to me.” So the roarings had to
begin.

Even these were far from perfect Their tepid success
of esteem could not deceive the mediocre and diffident
executant After a single performance, or, at the best, one
half-hearted encore, the audience would fall away, together
or apart, to prosecute pursuits of their own devising in some
distant corner; they only applied to him for occasional help,
congratulation or condolence, according to the fortunes of

BOOK ONE

17

these undertakings. Even then, d d they really do it
through any genuine need of their own? Or just from some
instinct of courtesy, lest he feel out of it?

Some things, of course, he could d(» for them. Auberon,
almost breathless with long and harvl scribbling on paper,
would come across from his chosen studio, the wide window-
seat that looked out on the river, brin ;ing his father a pencil
to re-sharpen. While this was being done, the child would
sit by his side, explaining clearly and kindly, “We have to
sharp it, ’00 know, or else no write wil come out at the end,”
and then return to his enchanting labours in the window.
That was all right. Auberon really could not put a point to
the pencil himself. But what about it, presently, when the
artist or author, the blast of his creative inspiration having
now blown itself out, came from the window again, his sheet
of paper densely overgrown with a thicket of contortionate
scrawlings. “See!” he said, with a just pride firmly
controlled, as he showed the masterpiece to his father.
“ See the pwojjuce of my twyings! ” First pausing to let
the thing tell, he added the natural comment upon an
accomplishment so remarkable; “ How big Bwon gwow-
ing! ” The father gravely admired. But had the boy had
need of him, really? Or only befriended him? Taken
him, out of charity, into his confidence?

Passing the night-nursery door when the children had
just gone to bed that evening. Garth heard himself mentioned
within. A hungry heart soon puts away shame: he basely
listened. Auberon was saying seriously: “ Fahva had a
good plan to-day. He made me have my rest in a sunny
place, afta my dinner.”

“ I think all Father’s plans are good,” Molly replied with
the same judicial gravity.

Auberon seemed to need time to ponder this wider state-
ment. Then he said “ Vevvy.”

c

i8 ROUGH JUSTICE

Molly, too, took her time, as if working it out, before
saying, “ I think he has a big plan in his heart and all the
little plans come out of it.” Thomas Garth marvelled.
Strange, the talk of children, still able to use the word
“ heart ” as simply as if it were “ tummy.” But could it
be that the children really thought as well of him as that?
Or were they just trying to make the best of the bad job
that he was? Nothing more came to show. Molly said,
rather maternally, “ Last good-night, Bron.” Bron said,
“ Goo’-night. F un to-morrow ” — a forecast with which
this resolute optimist always concluded the day.

IV

For several years now to come it was certainly fun on the
morrow, for Auberon. All sorts of common things went
to his head like strong waters; they filled him with glee,
merely because they were just what they were — iron
because it was cold to the hand, and wood because it was not,
and so on. Finding a hedgehog, a beast new to him, under
a shrub, he fairly circled round and round it in ecstasy,
glutting himself with the view of the creature from all
points of the compass. He could not look away when his
father came up: he could only say, out of the depths of his
joy, “ I am ree-garding it,” and then go on circling, ravished
above earth, like a little God finding his own creation very
good. “ How glorious is the cup of my drunkenness! ”
Auberon did not say it: but that was his state.

What could Thomas Garth have done? Caught the
child up in his arms, hugged him, said, “Oh! yes, yes, I
understand it all. You’ve got the secret. That’s success
in life. Don’t let them ever take it away from you.” Why,
of course Bron would only have stared, wondering what his
father meant If you know nothing but Heaven, how can
you even frame the idea of being pushed out of it? No

BOOK ONI

19

use: he could not reach the boy; so the bar of reserve went
on thickening between them.

V

Now and again it would seem a if signals could pass
pretty well between Garth and thr children; for some
divine minutes their three minds w uld interplay happily.
Riding out before breakfast they met trailing drift of cattle,
twenty head or so. “ Oh, Fahva, w» at sousands of cows! ”
Bron shouted, with joyous hyperbole.

Molly glanced quickly across at lis father. “‘Thou-
sands,’ ” she said, “ is just a sort of expression that Bron and
I have.”

Garth nodded. They presently came to a field more
yellow than others. Bron shouted elatedly, “ Sousands of
buttercups! ” Then he checked, pondered a moment, and
added, “ Real sousands. Not a ’spression.” It gave Garth
pleasure to see the child feeling its way towards the spare
and vivid precision of thoroughbred speech.

In the next meadow four horses were grazing. Garth
laughingly challenged the young hyperbolist: “ Thousands
of horses, Bronkin? ”

“ Oh, Fahva! ” Bron answered, “ that isn’t even a ’spres-
sion. It’s just a make-up. Not enough horses to make it
a ’spression.” The three laughed together: lines of com-
munication were blessedly open.

When thoroughpaced naughtiness came in due time, it
seemed to bring the two generations closer than anything
else did. Sin, I suppose, is an essentially confidential affair.
In the hands of affectionate justice the evil-doer is apt to
make the most queerly intimate avowals. One morning
Garth came down to discover the breakfast-table in a state
of eloquent disarray. Silver and napery were out of their
places, Bron red in the face, and Molly in manifest terror

20 ROUGH JUSTICE

for Bron. But Bron got in his word before Molly had
time to practise any diplomacy in his interest; “ I only
thwew a fish-knife at Molly because it wouldn’t hurt so
much as an ordina-wy one! ”

Onsets with any form of knife were spanking matters,
but Bron unwittingly made his spanking lighter than it
might have been. When his father had dealt him a not
very drastic slap on his extended right palm, some honest or
vainglorious strand among the culprit’s tangled impulses led
him quickly to say, “ That one didn’t hurt.” He held out
the other hand stoutly. Its portion was light indeed, though
heavy enough, I expect, to sting the executioner. For
Garth was taken in by none of the common cant about the
moral beauty of caning. He knew of nothing else to do,
when it came to the worst. But beating the tiny offender
who could not hit back, and with whom he wanted to be
friends, felt disgustingly like being rude to a servant.

VI

To this shabby indulgence of slanging the domestics Bron
was addicted, in seasons of wrath, for some time after Molly
had achieved the courtesy proper to their station. When
asked by Nurse why he had hidden under a bed at the
appointed hour for a walk, the baffled tactician retorted
with the furious counter-question: “ And why did you go
scweaming about the house afta me? Making a noise like
a person singing for money in the stweets! Tou that are
always sending people to Fahva to be scolded, just for your
pleasure! ”

This unknightly practice so grew upon Bron that for part
of his sixth year he fairly wallowed in the hot and turbid
waters of invective. His crowning debauch of the sort
occurred on a hot August morning. Bron had come in
tired, flustered and blowsed with the sun; chagrined, too,

BOOK ONE

21

by the miscarriage of one of his vast pi ms of civil engineering
in the gardeners’ heap of loose sand. A savage contro-
versial impulse led him on to assume, loudly and insolently,
that there would be chicken for d nner. “ Chookie, o’
course! ” he blustered and bluffed as he stumped up the
stairs. Alas for our poor human hopt-s: it was mutton.

Bron broke forth outrageously. ‘ Pig’s food again! ” he
ranted at Nurse j “just what you wol W give us! ”

Alone, and with all the sustainii g fires of anger now
quenched in his blood, Auberon had to repair to the study
that evening, when Father came home. Nurse never
reported any offence of the children’s. Whenever she com-
mitted either for trial, the prisoner had to go alone |to the
great assize in the study and state the case for the prosecution
as well as the defence. Bron made his sorry confession with
gulps and glowerings of distaste at the scurviest parts of the
story. Still, he shirked nothing. Then the man and the
boy looked ruefully at each other, linked in a momentary
communion of shame and pride. They were intimate for
that instant. “ Not clever, Bron. Not brave. Not
funny,” said Thomas, friendly and sorrowful. “ Only
shabby. Ugly.”

A queer thing is the building up of decency; a fine trait
may grow like an oak, almost imperceptibly, through many
years, or it may come up in the night like a mushroom out
on the lawn. Nature is said to do nothing by jumps, but a
boy that has had a surfeit of some darling vice may give it
up in an hour, utterly and for ever, like some favourite sweet
that has upset his stomach. Off came that particular' base-
ness, that night, like a shirt suddenly seen to be lousy. Bron
had got the idea — had suddenly discovered, once for all, the
beauty of one part of self-mastery.

22

ROUGH JUSTICE

VII

Still, his father could not pray for the old Adam in Bron
to multiply these occasions for mutual understanding. Nor
yet could he pick lovers’ quarrels with the boy, just for the
renewal of love — tempering fires like those in which the two
children re-annealed from time to time the good steel of
their comradeship. Garth would look on uninterferingly,
if he could, while these little furnaces roared. He knew well
enough that within the two quarrelling friends there worked
forces which knew their business better than he.

Molly, on a low chair, was deep in Robinson Crusoe^ while
Auberon played with his bricks on the drawing-room floor.
Wanting an ampler site, to build a palace, he said to Molly,
trenchantly, “Take ’oor feet from vvhere zey are in ’oor
rashness.” Molly, roused so rudely from her delicious pre-
occupation with Crusoe’s inventory of his household goods,
forgot for a moment that she was Bron’s mother, and
answered firmly, “ Imposterous! ” Then Bron jumped up
and came close to her face and said, in choler, “ ’Oo’re
a noosance! ” And Molly rebuked him with, “Well,
•jou shouldn’t blow cool winds on my face with your
ragings.” Thereupon Bron hallooed, “ Molly killing
Bron!” and Molly rejoined, “I’ve quite as lot of right
to tread on the floor with my feet as your bricks
have! ”

Bron now went to war and was beaten condignly, and then
Molly put her feet well out of his way. “ I’m sorry, Bron,”
she said ; “ you can hit me now, as hard as you like — any-
where — ^all over me.”

Bron said, “ No. It would be silly.”

“ Well,” said Molly, “ I’ll give you all my Life Guards.”

“ ’Oo mustn’t,” Bron replied; “ zey were a present.”

“ Then,” Molly said, “ I’ll lend you all my soldiers to

BOOK ONE 23

play with, as long as you like, if you won’t mind my having
beaten you.”

Bron bristled up again. “ ’Oo d Jn’t beat me. I beat
’00.”

Molly took it placably: “Your hands are very strong,
Bron, ’speshly when the feel of some « ne’s hair between your
fingers puts more strengf in them.”

Bron subsided, and Molly ended : all with, “You see,
when you called me a nuisance, I wr.v have been a nuisance
toyoUy but I wasn’t a nuisance in my s ght.”

Bron pondered, and left it at that. The storm had blown
itself out: from mind to mind, perhaps, an idea had passed.

Garth had seen it all through, from afar. He was better
out of it, better for them; tempers were furnished, like
ropes and ladders in gyms, for each little gymnast to over-
come for himself. Besides, if you butted in, to do good,
slips were easy to make. They would come, anyhow,
before you knew what you were doing. Musing one day
in a chair on the lawn. Garth was roused by a touch of Bron’s
hand at its muddiest, which was muddy indeed. The father
had said in an instant, “ Bron, do you like being so dirty? ”
And in another the son had answered, with dignity, “ No, I
don’t. But it’s me work.”

Then it was clear: a miss had been made; a message had
not been picked up. Bron had come up with a mighty con-
fidence to impart; he had wanted to offer his father a share
in a lofty satisfaction. For the first time the gardener had
granted an old prayer of Bron’s and given him a piece of
“ real work ” to do. All by himself he had dug a small bed
that had really needed digging. It would have been dug
by a gardener if no Bron had been there, with his great spade,
to do it.

CHAPTER III

I

T he greatest of innovations was started by Bron at
the age of seven. First of his generation he climbed
the big beech at the far end of the lawn.

It was a doughty climb; for the first twelve feet from the
ground there were no branches at all; the trunk was smooth
and too vast to embrace and shin up. But the enemy’s flank
could be turned. The children’s swing hung by two chains
from a level branch higher up; and Auberon told Molly that
night: “ I climbed up one of the chains to its top, and then,
with great difficillily, I lifted my leg over the branch, and
then I climbed up. I found it ’straordinaly safe in the tip-
top of the tree, where the magpies live. Safer than on the
ground, ’cause you only hold on to the ground by your feet.
At the top the wind waves you about and you hear the
tree purring. We must cert’nly live in the trees always.
I’m conPdent Fahva won’t be dang’rous about it, even if
Nurse is,”

Nurse might have been. But Bron had scented aright his
father’s sympathy with the joy of cutting the tether which
ties the duller beasts to the flat earth. Garth might be an
old Tory, but he was not an old hen, to spare himself tremors
by keeping his sturdy brood from adventuring in new
elements. Little monkeys ought to be monkeys. So the
two found they were free to live the new, the thrilling
arboreal life. They found delicious prehensile powers in
their hands and feet, and unsuspected skill that came respons-
ively up, ready-made, out of unexplored depths, to meet the
needs of this novel existence.

Molly supped the new intoxicant the more soberly of the
two. She always had her ward, Bron, to think for. But
Bron grinned with ungovernable glee every time his feet

24

BOOK ONF

25

quitted the ground: he drew up his legs to the lowest branch
with a triumphant snatch. What harm could any snake in
the grass below do to him now? Th e glee of him quivered
and flicked in his naked soles when they fitted themselves
clenchingly on to the adorable, graspal e roundness of middle-
sized boughs. “ Isn’t it abs’utely tromendrous,” he asked
Molly with fervour, “ the way en’mits can’t creep up behind
you in a tree? ”

II

And yet, I suppose, mankind mu>;t always be growing.
7'hat very autumn the two were impelled, by Heaven knows
what, to get them down from the trees and establish them-
selves in a hole in the face of a low gravel cliff that impended
over the river. Nature had roughed out this cavern; Molly
and Bron revised her handiwork, enlarging it into a kind of
sand-martin’s hole on a grand scale. Thus perfected, it
ran some five feet horizontally into the vertical bosom, or
riverain frontage, of Middlesex. Then it took a sharp turn
to the left. Artificial thenceforth, it persisted for some six
feet more. Its end was out of sight of the world, and the
darkness of this ultimate refuge, even at noonday, elated
Bron till no utterance except incoherent song was possible
for him.

Peace passing all understanding enveloped the two
pioneers when they sat supreme at the mouth of this cave on
their return from some distant and momentous expedition.
No fearsome beast had turned up in their absence and settled
himself in at the far end of the cave; their land reposed; they
could rest and thank the stars that had sent them a governess
for lesson-times only and not, like Claude Barbason’s, a
directress of their leisure and organiser of approved outdoor
occupations.

As that winter closed down and darkness came on before
tea-time, the two would light a small fire of sticks in the

26

ROUGH JUSTICE

mouth of the cave and sit on the safe side, the cave side, of
the blaze, broody with silent contentment, peering through
their turbid stockade of smoke and flickering flame at the
shifting glooms and gleamings along the nondescript fore-
shore beyond, at the whispering river and Gistleham Ait,
the savage island of osiers and rank grasses in mid-stream,
untrodden as yet by foot of Molly or Bron. From that
island jungle, with only a reasonable amount of assistance
from imagination, a lion or leopard, extremely famished, but
awed and perplexed by the glow of the fire, might readily be
discerned peering back at the two settlers’ illuminated faces.

With this stronghold always there to fall back on, they
practised the arts of the hunter and of the hunted, stealing
up like stalking cats upon the herons in Gistleham Reach,
to watch them fishing in the shallows; plunging their bared
arms swiftly down at eels seen lying lazily at the river’s
bottom; or else effacing themselves, with held breath and
tumultuous pulse, among dry reeds or whatever garden
rubbish was most like their clothes, when the abhorred time
came for going in for the night, and Nurse once more
became “ dangerous.”

“ Isn’t it delicouSy' Bron would say to Molly, using an
emphasis that cannot be rendered by any resources of print,
“ when you are hiding behind a tree that’s really too little
to hide you prop’ly? Not moving at all, but just having a
struggle to make your body be littler! Tremendrous! ”

III

The vogue of the cavern lasted till Bron’s eighth birthday,
a festival hailed, at its dawn, with the ecstatic cry, “ It is
to-day ” — shouted through the open door to Molly’s room
— ^and bidden farewell to, next morning, with the reflection,
also uttered privately to Molly, “ Well, anyhow, I am eight
still.” Almost from that day, strange to say, the cavern

BOOK ONE

27

seemed to irk the maturing Bron. New desires possessed
him in his riper age. Away with all slavish home-keeping!
Out into the great world! The no )leness of life was to
cross the unfathomed backwater that litherto had cut them
off from the pathless thickets of Gist ^ham Ait, affront the
unknown fauna of the island and plu k out the heart of its
marshy mystery.

“It’s dang’rous,” Bron argued gn^vely to Molly, “still
we have to do it — else nothing will 1 ver be any good, any
more.”

Molly gave in, though uneasy about Auberon’s imperfect
swimming. Choosing the after-dinner hour when Nurse,
by Heaven’s kindly connivance, used to “ drop off ” under
the beech-tree, they swiftly stripped among the rhododen-
drons nearest the shore and struck out lustily for the New
World.

They swam, for security’s sake, in close formation. Molly,
the stronger vessel, had stipulated for this, Bron was to
swim on the upstream side of her, with his left hand on her
right shoulder. So the sturdy Molly was the main propul-
sive force of the whole equipage; but the lesser legs of Bron
and his disengaged right arm provided auxiliary screws of no
mean value, as Molly eagerly assured their proprietor, while
she insisted, nevertheless, upon her precautions.

The nervously short strokes of the pair, rapid as those of
scared frogs, can scarcely have had to be plied for two
minutes before the naked explorers were plunging on feet
and hands up the mud banks of the enchanted island, to hide
and recover breath among its serried osiers.

“We’re form’able swimmers ! ” Bron panted elatedly, when
they could settle down for a moment, under cover. “ Well
done us. Bags this island private to us.”

“ Watch where the sun is,” Molly anxiously urged.
Steering by the glorious lamp of Heaven they committed

28

ROUGH JUSTICE

themselves to the trackless forest of withies, forced a waj^
across the new continent’s sixty good yards of breadth and
beheld in amaze the main stream beyond, with its unfamiliar
system of forelands, eddies and bays, all freakish and de-
lectable.

“ Tremendrous! Delicous! ” Bron stood doating on it
all, till Molly espied some one fishing far off in a punt, and
then they knew they were naked and plunged back into the
scrub. But the earth was theirs, and the fulness thereof.

IV

Three months later the water turned achingly cold; the
rough island story grew rougher; the numbed hearts of the
furtive swimmers cried out for a boat. Father’s boat and
punt were locked up in the boat-house, pending the children’s
passing of a stiff swimming test. Clearly they had to found
a marine of their own, unobserved.

First a plank was privily requisitioned and launched, for
ferry service. But this rude craft was found to exhibit the
unforeseen and quite incorrigible vice of taking a heavy list
to one side or one end, without provocation or warning, and
tilting the ship’s company into the Thames.

Only then did they respectfully take into council Bert,
the new garden boy, a genius “ tremendrously good,” as
Bron had already noticed, at making all sorts of things.
With Bert as principal naval designer, they painfully stretched
a skin of old canvas tight over a sketchy framework of wood
and nailed the edges of the canvas down upon the gunwale
with tin tacks, to form a gaunt coracle, a thing of sunken
cheeks and prominent ribs.

This Genius of Famine, expressed in terms of naval
architecture, they then tarred to repletion. Bert, the all-
foreseeing, contrived the tar. The thing floated, only too
well. Fantastically buoyant, she almost refused to displace

BOOK ONE

29

any water at all. She whirled rour d on her base at the
touch of light airs, like a leaf that hits fallen dry on a lake.
But she served. She changed the wc rid. The charm of a
strange new accessibility suddenly invested the farther bank
of the main stream. It was “ tremendrous.”

V

Of course Thomas Garth had se^m much of this and
inferred all the rest. He had tried, ui observed, to cut down
the risks of the game as much as he o uld without depriving
the two of the training of free adventure, from which you
can never keep risk wholly out. He coveted for them the
joy and the education of winning at least the physical world
for themselves.

They won it, triumphantly. First they won the world
as it stood, with no history to it — just the feel of the earth
as it was to the senses now — what it would be if it had all
been made only last night and were not a worn ancient face,
seamed, stained and engraved with endless cross-hatching of
documentary wrinkles, its mountains the ruins of more
wondrous heights now all but erased, our life upon it, per-
haps, by this time the unconsciously subsident life of an
over-blown rose. Whatever the date, wherever they were,
Molly and Bron stood, as yet, at the centre and lived in the
prime. Everything, just as they saw it, was all that it could
be thought of as being} every tree was of its only con-
ceivable age and size; any break in the line of camp-shedding
along the flank of the Ait was normal, not a falling-away
from some higher state that should be. Petty kinks in the
line of the foreshore, silted shoals at the tail of the Ait or at
some ditch’s toy estuary, eddies stealing back upstream in
angles between the bank and the little sharp currents thrown
off obliquely from tiny headlands — all these were not relics
of any old doings of water and land} nothing of any sort

30 ROUGH JUSTICE

was mere postscript, nor yet prefece; neither did they lead
up to any greater condition of things nor were they lapses
from one; they had the unqualified worth of a first Creation
of all The two saw all there was and, behold ! it was very
good — almost as if they had made it.

VI

But history comes. You may start without any, so far
as you know; but all the rest of the time you are touching
or making it. Eve ate an apple, and see all that happened.

The children had not been navigators for more than a
year before historic events that stood out enormous in the
life of Gistleham Reach were commemorated in names not
known to Ordnance surveyors: Massacre Bight, where, after
age-long vigils, the two had seen the fledgeling cuckoo eject
the lawful heirs of the mansion; Floaty Head, the insig-
nificant cape of sand where Auberon first detected, and
showed to Molly, the sun-dried granules of flint floating off
on a rising tide, though the world said that stones did not
float; Misery Spit, where that first-built and best-loved of
canoes rammed itself, during the hottest of Augusts, upon a
truly venomous snag — a spiky stake, almost as hard and
unwoodlike as iron, that stuck up a few inches slantwise out
of the bed of the shrunken stream.

While the crew had waded ruefully around the wreck,
essaying salvage, Bron’s naked feet, plunging distractedly
hither and thither, had struck one stumpy tooth of the same
kind after another. In talk with his father at breakfast next
day these perils to shipping were touched upon with some
bitterness. “ Father,” Bron said gravely, “ the river has
got a sort of sharp nails sticking up through its soles, to hurt
people and boats.” He went on to describe these enormities
more precisely.

Thomas Garth, as you know, was eccentric. “ The old

BOOK ONE

31

boy,” Colin would say, “ is a gravey ;rd that won’t do its
work. The greatest school and the greatest university in
the world tried to give a good classic.il education a decent
burial in him, as well as in me and you. But in Garth
the thing won’t lie quiet and mouloer. It gets up and
‘ walks it comes poking into the rea , serious affairs of the
day.”

Learned writers of the kind who s t in chairs, weighing
documentary proofs, and don’t go out .nd look at the things
and places that they write of, had lat dy been saying more
positively than ever that Caesar and his troops must certainly
have waded across the respectable arm of the sea now con-
stricted between the Palace of Westminster and St. Thomas’s
Hospital — then flanked by handsome fringes of marsh on
each side — on their way north to St. Albans. But Garth
had known, all his life, as well as he knew his own flower-
garden, the great ford of Thames, a mile down Gistleham
Reach. There he had seen little launches run aground in
the fairway, at summer low water, and children standing
knee-deep in mid-stream. In league with his latest in-
formant, Bron, he now set forces in motion which ended by
drawing out of the gravel under the muddy bed of the stream
some hundreds of semi-petrified oak stakes, planted in rows
and all leaning the same way as that which had bruised Bron
in the heel. Then a few learned men began to remind the
rest that the Venerable Bede had noticed the same thing as
Bron, only twelve centuries soonerj were not these hundreds
of stakes a few of the thousands the British Cassivelaunus
had driven well in, to engage the bowels of the Roman troops
as they forded the river breast-high?

Molly and Auberon had not heard about Caesar before.
He seemed to be a great fellow. So Bron got quite the wrong
introduction to him and his men — not as nominatives and
accusatives and other instructive occasions for parsing, but

32 ROUGH JUSTICE

as the drenched waders now described by his father as
sweating and spitting and cursing the beastly stakes that
caught them so nastily in the tummy. Bron listened en-
tranced while he heard, in his father’s words, which tingled
with life, the hook-nosed captain’s tale of his brush with the
Britons at the ford. Bron wriggled and crowed with excite-
ment. Think of the horses splashing and stumbling across,
the men on foot panting up the steep bank, dripping wet; and
then the Britons above, turning tail of a sudden — changed
from a defiant, yelling front into scampering figures huge and
clear on the sky-line !

The vision gave Bron strange new pleasures. School was
all to come yet. No one had put it into his head that there
was anything rotten or mean in liking to know about Romans
and poor, funny old Britons.

VII

When they were veterans of twelve and nine, Molly and
Bron looked back with a kind of pity on that benighted state
of themselves in which they did not yet know Victor Nevin.
Strange to think that even in those old days the brilliant
Victor had already been going about the world, shining, and
they utterly unaware of it.

One or two other friends of about their own age had
already dazzled the humble eyes of the pair before Victor
the Conqueror first hove in sight, for tea on Molly’s ninth
birthday. Colin March was always ‘‘tremendrously funny” :
Claude Barbason, when not hoarding toys in grim silence,
had a way with him that made you feel how little you knew
the great world. But Victor was the nonpareil; Victor was
imperturbable, the comely, the witty and wise, the serenely
smiling dominator of people and of circumstances. Bron
had fairly sat gaping with admiration during that eye-opening
tea. How can a person eat his tea and not listen to

BOOK ONE

33

Victor’s compersations? ” he had indignantly asked when
rebuked by Nurse for not getting on wirh his food.

“Listening to Victor’s compersati >ns ” had, from that
time forth, been one of the headiest of lawful pleasures.
Molly’s riper mind could, of course, mjoy even more than
Bron’s of the flavour of Victor’s ironic and allusive wit
Victor was godlike, and to confess anc worship him was the
only thing to be done — at any rate for a soul so downright as
Molly. She did it freely the second time he came to the
house. Victor and she had been wast ing their hands in the
bath-room basin at the same time, a; id Victor was nattily
pushing down the skin at the roots of his oval and roseate
finger-nails.

“ You’re nice,” Molly began.

Victor did not contest it.

“ Your green tie is nice,” the adorer resumed.

“ So glad you like it,” said Victor.

A short pause and then Molly said firmly, “ I’m perfec’ly
sure that you can bath yourself all right.” And then,
“ When you fall down I ’spec’ you never cry. Y ou
just say ‘ Oh ! ’ ” and then again, “ Even if a wild
beast were to eat you, you wouldn’t cry. You’d only
grumble.” This litany of Molly’s was not ill received by
the divine addressee.

Then and ever since, five minutes of Victor had always
sufficed to reduce our two homespun wits to a state of almost
kneeling admiration. And now their seasoned judgments
confirmed their earlier impressions.

Sometimes Victor would come for a whole day. Then
he would review the Chantry composedly, say that the house
was a little too much out of the world, and practise critical
charity towards the garden and everything that was in it
“ I thought that I would see,” he said at tea-time on one of
these days, “ how much your two garden-boys knew. So

o

34 ROUGH JUSTICE

when I saw them helping the man to plant some elders
to-day I said, ‘ After you’ve planted these elders, will you
be planting any youngers? ’ Fred saw the joke pretty soon,
but we had to explain it to Bert.”

Bron and Molly roared; their laughter would come as
pat as any chorus to Victor’s sallies. For reasons which
they could not, for the life of them, have given, they would
not themselves have played off this jest upon Bert, even if
they had had the requisite genius. Still, it must be all right:
Victor had done it.

“ Putrid name — ‘ Bert,’ really,” Victor resumed. Just
by the way he pronounced a name, Victor could put a kind
of inverted commas round it, and these were extraordinarily
damaging; you felt you must have been a dullard not to have
thought it a measly name long ago.

The face of Bron fell. A blight, a killing blight, had
fallen on the name of the valued co-author of the first
canoe, Victor’s alert feelers warned him, no doubt, for he
sheered off a little, without abruptness. “ Talking of
names,” he said, “ do you know what’s a common name in
Scotland? ”

“ No. What? ” they both eagerly asked.

“ Thistle,” said Victor.

Bron gaped. “For persons?” he asked in amaze-
ment.

“ No. For plants,” Victor said, with a slight, curly
smile on his Cupid’s-bow lips. None of your blatant
triumphs for Victor.

The two listeners marvelled. The ease of it all. The
ingenuity!

“ I do believe,” said Bron that night to Molly, after
Lights Out, “ that Victor always has an underneath meaning
to his talk! ”

“ Y es. And isn’t it wonderful,” Molly added, “ the way

BOOK ONE 35

he sits there in his chair, putting his little smile on all the
day-nursery? ”

“ Tremendrous! ” Bron agreed. “And then his de-
scribation of the tipsy man! Wasn’t t inciting? ” Bron’s
English, when he was deeply stirred was apt to become
rashly experimental.

vin

More fatally rash were Bron’s few and short surrenders
to a certain mad impulse that sometime^ arose in him. What
if he, Bron, should come out strong, i ke Victor? — shine in
conversation and have people admire l.im? Pricked by this
transient spur of ambition he ventured at long intervals to
launch some topic of his own, drawn from his special interests
in the make of birds or of ships. “ Victor,” he asked, with
a strained composure, when one of these wild fits possessed
him, “ where, do you think, are the works of a ship? ”

“ Well, and where, O most wise Bron? ” Victor replied,
with a curiosity merely polite and, indeed, slightly ironic.
The Nevins were all eminent Latins and Grecians. Quite
young they learnt to contemn all physical science as
“ Stinks.” And was not marine engineering a subdivision of
Stinks?

“ In its bo-els,” said Bron firmly, controlling his pride as
he spoke. “ Under its crop. Truly.”

Victor winced expressively. “Truly? Truly a disgust-
ing truth 1 ” he observed.

Bron’s topic instantly wilted. Victor’s ban had a won-
drous power of bringing home to you the conviction of sin,
especially the sin of grossness. And in that sin I fear that
Bron almost revelled. When it came to the pleasures of
the table, and to its pains, he was Rabelaisian. “ O Father!
Sir! Good man!” he would cry, at the mid-day meal,
when liberally helped to something toothsome. A tough
piece of meat would move him to say darkly, “ This gristle

36 ROUGH JUSTICE

IS all full of springs. When I bite it, it jumps bigger under
my teeth,” and the first curds and whey of a year drew
from him the rhapsody, “ It brings forth the Spring on my
brow! ” But it was at seasons of festal repletion that Bron
sank lowest. He came back from a birthday tea at Claude
Barbason’s house to find Molly and Victor in the Chantry
garden. Bron described the feast, its glories and the at-
tendant sorrows. Everything at the Barbasons’ was always
magnificent. “ At tea,” he averred, “ there was nothing
plain whatever. The lowest thing was some splendid
sandwiches. The only thing that I don’t like is that all
the inner parts of my stummick are sore.”

Victor smiled across to Molly — a confidential smile that
seemed to offer her the privilege of sharing his amusement
at the sight of this poor Goth.

** It’s like a kitty growling,” the unperceiving Bron went
on, with his round, red, ingenuous face full of care.

“ What is? ” Molly asked, in discomfort.

“ Some sort of grumpy music going on inside me,” said
the shameless one.

Victor’s laugh at this was addressed wholly to Molly.
It co-opted her, still more distinctly, into the civilised set,
the elect, the non-hogs.

‘‘ I wonder,” Bron said, as he scratched a head heavy
from the banquet, “ why it is that niceness in your mouth
should not be good for the inside vitals of your body.”

“ Oh, don’t scratch your head so,” Molly whispered in
distress.

“ I have to scratch it,” the spent reveller pleaded aloud.
“ It’s all bizzing with tickles,”

Bron,” said Molly, that night, from bed to bed, through
the half-open door, I’m making myself a sort of promise
not to remark about eatables, ever again.”

** Scand’Ius! ” said Bron. “How can any one not talk

BOOK ONE

37

about prog when they’ve had a progi.ndous day, as I have
to-day? And then a sincere pain in t) eir body! ”

“ I do believe,” Molly urged, “ wf ’ve always talked too
much about our tummy pains. I’vt done it much more
than you — much more than nice people do. They might
think us nasty.”

“ A habit,” Bron said, doggedly, ‘ that’s once d’veloped
can’t be un’veloped.”

“ Do let’s try,” Molly pleaded. “ Too’ night!

“ Goo’ night.”

No doubt Molly saw, well enough, that he was going to
try. A little grumbling from Bron, iii such cases, was only
like the scraping and plunging of a horse trying to get a
heavy load under way.

“ Goo’ night, again,” Molly said gratefully. “ Last
glowing goo’ night.”

“ Goo’ night,” said Bron. “ Fun to-morrow.”

IX

Victor came of a caste less antique than the Garths, but
still choice in its way. The Nevins were academic, but
socially they were elect; children of light, they could hold
their own with any child of this world. For a hundred
years their clan had drawn from “ the things of the mind ”
— 3. phrase which they used a good deal — a full stock of
the good things of this life. Nevins grew up, with the
un flustered ease of geranium cuttings reared under glass,
into bishops, deans, head-masters, heads of houses at Oxford
and Cambridge. They scarcely seemed to compete or to
strive. A Nevin was deferentially served with bays, a
laurel wreath, or a choice palm, and then the other aspirants
scrambled among themselves for any honorific green-stuff
that might be left over. Like great princes of the Church
in an earlier age the Nevins had gained the ear of the world’s

38 ROUGH JUSTICE

rulers and yet retained the distinction of being vessels of
grace; they acted as standing counsel for culture and con-
servators of serious critical standards.

“ And what is all the merriment about? ” Victor asked,
looking in at the door of the bath-room. Molly, nail-
brush in hand, was helping Bron to dig out dark earth from
his nails, before the nursery dinner.

Molly’s careless laughter ceased. “ Only a little make-
up of ours,” she said, deprecating! y. Molly walked in the
fear as well as the love of the god-like curator of civilisation.

Bron was less wary, “ About a very poetical man,” he
said, “ who worked in a garden. We made up a poem:

“ His talk was all rhyme.

His nails were all grime.”

Bron roared again at the funniness of this composition.
Victor didn’t laugh. “ If I may break it to you,” he said,
with Olympian aplomb; “ that isn’t a poem. It’s only a
dogger’I.”

Even Bron was stricken sober. But yet more repre-
hensible than his aesthetic blindness was his turn for sub-
versive speculation. “ Isn’t it curious,” he pondered aloud
as the three children lay on the hot August lawn and blinked
at the dazzling river, “ how people say a dull book is dry,
but they don’t say a nice book is wet. Why shouldn’t you
say ‘a perfectly sopping animal story’? ”

“ ‘ A dry book,’ ” said Victor judicially, “ is an idiom.”

That ended that Bron’s craze for going behind things
which need only be looked at in front was checked, for the
time. The three lay silent, blinking and thinking. Then
Bron suddenly asked: “ Victor, what is a glory? ”

Victor counter-questioned “ Why? ”

“ Because I’ve heard God has a thing he’s fond of, called
his glory.”

BOOK ONE

39

It’s all in the Bible, all right,” sai J Victor dismissively.

This time, however, Bron was havin g it out. “ And why,”
he went on, “ do they say he’ll come to try us all for doing
sins when they say he’s here now — evt ry where, all the time?
He must be just on top of my head nc

“ My good vain youth ” Victo' began.

But Bron was for making the mos' of his outing, before
the prison-house of shyness and hur lility should close on
him again. “If he’s everywhere,” f e persisted, “ he must
be there as much as anywhere else. So why has he got to
come? And sometimes they say he’.l come with a noise,
and sometimes they say we won’t hear him because he’ll
come with little quiet feet, like a fly’s pats or a kitty’s, and
turn people upside down who do sins.”

“ My dear asinine goose,” said Victor, quite disturbed by
these wanderings away from respectable tracks, “ all that’s
after you’re dead.”

But Bron plunged on. “ I don’t believe,” he said, “ you’re
ever quite dead. I’m pos’tive that if I were put in a grave
I could just reach up with my arm through the earth,
slowly, moving it by little bits and scratching letters on the
ground on top, for people to see. How do we know that
the kitty we buried won’t move just a tiny bit? ”

“ O, let’s dress up and do acting,” said Victor.

“ Yes, yes,” Molly cried. It was dreadful to have poor
old Bron seeming silly to Victor, and Victor snubbing Bron.
And Victor was sure to be jolly if they acted, he did it so
marvellously well.

Victor was author, producer and actor in one, like
Moliere; the way he could make up speeches amazed the
two others. Molly received a few goodish parts at his
hands: the heroine has to be somebody. But Bron got
mainly the scurvy tasks that are apt to fall to the minor
“ utility ” actor under the actor-manager system. And,

40 ROUGH JUSTICE

now, after doing patiently the Recreant Knight, the Furtive
Assassin, the Hard Father and the Peasant Slave, Bron
jibbed when he was directed to stab himself and fall dead
across the mail-clad body of Victor, as became the Faithful
Page. “ No,” he demurred. “ It’s too silly.”

“ My good lad,” said Victor, “ you don’t really expect to
be the Knight Templar? At your age! ”

The conscious moderation of Victor’s tone put Bron
hopelessly in the wrong. He weakened. “ I don’t mind,”
he said, “ saying, ‘ Don’t insult valour in the form of this
fallen knight! ’ But I have a strong obnoxion to stabbing
mj^elf. It’s silly.”

“ Well, well ” Victor said resignedly. Human per-

versity had to be humoured, no doubt. Bron was let off
the supreme sacrifice. But a passing demur, like this, never
meant that he questioned Victor’s genius for the drama.
His admiration was much too profound to be uttered to
Victor himself. But Molly heard about it and echoed it.
Bed talked to bed in the dark. “ Vick is most terrific’ly
good,” Bron said on the night after the first performance of
that rattling farce, “ The Medical Man.” “ He sticks the
key into your mouth in ’zac’ly the proper place for a ther-
ometer. I know, ’cause I’ve had my real tempiture taken
by Dr. Wynne. Simply tremendrous, Vick’s goodness at
acting! ”

Isn't he wonderful,” Molly said with intensity; “ Goo’
night, Bron.”

“ Goo’ night. Fun to-morrow.”

X

In his tenderest years Auberon had picked up a dangerous
habit: he took it that people meant all they said — if not
that they meant even more. This came of living too much
with his father. When Thomas Garth said he hoped ”

BOOK ONE

41

to take Molly and Bron out for a ric^e or a row or a swim
the next day, Bron knew that this benefit was a pretty sure
thing.

Of course he knew, all right, wha: lying was. He had
tried it. Long ago he had found that a lie could often get
him a thing that he wished for. So hf' had told lies. Their
power seemed magical. Things th *t he feared to meet
could be charmed out of his path with a simple lie. Then
he was found out and there came a g- od, long, friendly talk
with his father.

He now learnt that his father had made precisely the same
find as himself: it seemed his father knew, as well as Bron,
what an Aladdin’s slave-of-the-lamp this lying could be —
a getter of gains and a saviour from things that hurt or
scared or gave you trouble. And yet his father felt that to
call up this slave was “ pretty mean,” however grievous your
need.

His father did not exactly say why: he did not put it in
so many words that all the virtues worth having were various
forms of courage and all the vices were various modes of
turning tail and showing white feathers. And yet that
notion did pass from the man to the child. Words in
themselves, I suppose, are naught and the best of phrases
only groups of clickings of teeth and pursings and partings
of lips upon jets of soiled air. The little or much that they
mean depends on what you feel the creature to be who is
making these signals at the time. When Thomas Garth
said he thought lies pretty mean, Bron felt he was being let
into one of the magnificent secrets of the grown-up; in-
stantly and for ever it became one of the bottom certainties
of life that lies were a sort of sneak filth which nobody
would touch, once he knew what it was. All grown-up
people were brave and said only just what they meant.

With this precarious faith still unquenched, Bron entered

42 ROUGH JUSTICE

a church, at the age of ten, for the first time since his
christening. Why not sooner? Because his father had
religion alive and aflame in himself and did not want his
son to be rendered incapable of winning that treasure. So
he had not let the child be drilled from the first to repeat
things which, if they are uttered at all, ought to rise to the
lips like insuppressible cries of love or grief. Bron, as you
know, had heard some random talk about God. But he
had not heard the full story of Christ nor seen a congregation
of people saying they were miserable and wicked when they
were clearly on very good terms with' themselves and the
world, well pleased with their clothes, and standing
up without fear for human or divine inspection. This
lack of proper experience led to a sad upset the first
time that Bron, under the escort of Nurse, was immersed
in the flood of astonishing and touching assertion that
is let loose in places of worship about eleven on Sunday
mornings.

The outside of Gistleham parish church had always looked
quiet and safe. A goodly piece of Tudor brick, with some
small second-hand Roman bricks thrown in to save money,
it sat serene on its banked plinth of earth, secure above more
literal floods and spring tides. For Bron’s ears its un-
commonly good peal of bells, doubly charged with melody
by the liquid sounding-board lying below, had always shaken
out the very soul of mellow romance upon the listening
night when the ringers practised on Wednesday evenings.
Bron had often lain awake late, squirming for joy, as he
sucked in this enchanting melody.

Uncle Quentin, too, the aged holder of this cure of souls,
had always before been one of the least disturbing of men.
But now — ! First there was some lovely singing and reading.
Uncle Quentin betrayed no agitation during this part. But
then he climbed the pulpit stairs and gave out a piece of

BOOK ONE

43

terrible news — no doubt, Bron felt, because so many people
were all there together and might help at once. It was a
rending tale of some kind and brave man ferociously hurt a*
long time ago, and feeling a dreadful rain, even now, because
there was something not done which he wanted them all to
do for him.

Old Quentin Garth certainly knew how to preach. Bron
wept beside Nurse in the family pew, shrinking shamefacedly
back into his corner. But people eemed to be strangely
tranquil. Instead of rushing out to help they sang another
hymn, quite slowly. Even when they came out of church
they walked away as if nothing remarkable had happened and
nothing had to be done. And Nurse, when anxiously ques-
tioned, only said we mustn’t take things too much to heart —
people would think us so odd if we did. Strange! Why,
Uncle Quentin had just said: “We must take to heart all
that Jesus has borne for us.”

Molly was down with measles, and not to be seen. Bron,
alone in his distress, almost tackled his father. If only he
had done it, this might have changed many things that came
to pass later on. But Bron’s first hesitant word of approach
to the avowal was, somehow, not caught: his father may have
been thinking of something else; and so Bron lost heart and
gave up, as will happen between fathers and sons; the ships
draw near in the dark till a shout would carry across the little
interval that is left; but some one is not on the watch;
nothing passes across; and then the two vessels sheer off
again to estranging distances.

Beaten there, Bron felt he must now wait till Monday,
agonising as it was. Bert, the leal Bert, the sensible and
friendly Bert, would then be back at work in the garden.
Bert would help. But Bron had learnt a little caution
already. It seemed curiously easy to get oneself thought
silly. So it was with a cunning show of idle inquisitiveness

H ROUGH JUSTICE

that he asked Bert, before breakfast on Monday, “ what all
the talk was about — what people were saying — about Jesus
•Christ.”

Bert’s introduction to Christian history had not been put
off so long as Bron’s. Bert had long been a patient fre-
quenter of Uncle Quentin’s Sunday-school. On hearing
Christ’s name he went off like a musical-box: “ ’ceived by
th’ Oly Ghos’, born a Virgimary, suffed undepontius Pilate,
’scruc’fied ’ead a-buried, sended into Hell, Thursday rose
again, sended into Heaven, sense a shall come a -judge

quick-a-dead ” Bert broke off after delivering this passage

gravely, like an incantation. “ Don’t ya know it? ” he said,
rather shocked. Bert told Bron, straight off the reel, any
number of things about Christ — parables, miracles, snubbings
of Jews — things that Thomas Garth had saved up for Bron
till he could have some chance of hearing them with
understanding. Still, it was clear that no idea of Christ’s
fate, as an occurrence actual and dreadful, as if some one
were drowning in the river or being dragged by a bolting
pony, had ever visited Bert.

XI

Auberon was to go to the Nevins’ next day: not to tea,
for the measles barred that, but just to play with Victor in
the garden. Vick — why, of course — Vick was the man to
consult in this strait. Vick knew everything.

Snow lay on the ground, and the two were having fun
with a sledge when Auberon broached the great topic.
Victor winced. His precocious sense of a good theme to
keep off was worthy of an archbishop. Still, he kept up
very well the light, cheery tone of the elder, the man who
knows better. “ Compose yourself, my Auberon,” he said,
** and let bygones be bygones.”

Auberon only rushed on, all the harder. Victor tried to

BOOK ONE

45

head him off with a quotation adapted, in Victor’s scholarly
way — he was thirteen now — from the poets :

‘‘ Aub‘ron, wait a little Ic iger
Till your little wits arc stronger.”

Growing slightly graver as his junior persisted in indiscretion,
Victor fished out a thing that he hs 1 heard his father, the
great Dr. Nevin, quote with relish from The Imitation —
something like “ What’s the good of asking a lot of tough
questions, when God won’t ever bla ne you for not know-
ing.? ” Good doctrine, too, for the Nevins of this world to
bring up when its enfants terrihles^ its devastatory probers of
questions that are better left untouched, begin their comfort-
killing pranks. But Auberon seemed to find this good diet
about as satisfying as sawdust.

Only one thing was left for a prudent physician of souls
to prescribe. The sledge had lain unused while they talked.
Auberon, Victor said, must be frozen with standing about,
talking. Let him fall to; let him pull the sledge with a
will. Victor, whose fur gloves were immense, would will-
ingly sit on the sledge and play driver.

Auberon gave way and hauled. Victor adjured him to
go faster and faster. “Work jolly hard, Bron,” he said.
“ It makes you broiling. I’ve often tried it.”

Bron, being sturdy as well as desperate, tugged mightily.
Quite a good medicine, too, though Victor may not have
known much about it. So long as twin-brother body is well
clenched for work, like a fist, twin-brother mind may be able
to keep care away.

XII

Uncle Quentin preached again the next Sunday. Good
stuff too, Auberon thought. It told you what to do. “ Be
Christlike, one to another.” Were we not — so Uncle

46 ROUGH JUSTICE

Quentin asked his hearers — ^all castaways on the earth ? — a
mere boatful of sailors marooned in mid-ocean, on some
desolate speck of bare island? Let us be loyal comrades.
No shirking of our bit of work! No grabbing at more
than our share of whatever small good things were going 1

Under the spell of this second masterpiece Auberon made
a clean breast, to Bert, of his alarm lest Christ should happen
to look that way — that afternoon perhaps — and say in a
regretful voice that Auberon was using too much of the
castaways’ stock of fuel on these cold wet days, or eating
more than his ration of shellfish and clams, or whatever
castaways in Gistleham ate in their stead. To make things
more fit for divine inspection, Auberon pressed upon Bert
a kind of covenant of early Christian communism, at any
rate in the important matter of sweets — all goodies received
thenceforward by either Christian to be pooled and fairly
halved for consumption. Bert agreed. He liked Auberon
and he venerated the family* Still, he marvelled. The
Christian lymph had never “ taken ” like this in the calm
soul of Bert, though Bert was a good fellow too.

Molly, when she could be talked to, came nearer to
understanding it all. Molly was always decent about Bron’s
little rushes this way and that. She accompanied him on
his sallies as some mothers ride in the train of adventurous
sons, half amused at the crude ardours of men while wholly
bent on taking care of their own particular paladins. Quite
mother ish was Molly’s steady sense of the paramount worth
of unfevered well-being in body and soul; she was all for
preserving alive creatures who, only a short time ago, were
invaluable curvilinear babies, especially Bron. So Molly
indicated to Bron all the nice sensible people — Nurse, Bert,
Victor, Colin, Claude, Uncle Quentin himself on all week-
days — whom the New Testament was not visibly upsetting.

There she touched Bron’s yielding side. Every one

BOOK ONE

+7

seemed to know so much better than he! They all had
fine, clear, sweeping things to say, rigiit off, while he was
fumbling for words to explain how pu2iled he was. Surely
they must be right. So, by degrees, tl e restive part of him
allowed itself to be patted and strokeci down into a pretty
safe state of conformity. Even before he went away to be
squashed by the best of prep-schools, 'f public schools and
universities into the standard mould ( f his class, any wild
and strong notions he had of his own vere learning to lurk
in quiet corners of his mind, well out o:' people's way. Like
the Red Indian braves they were bein^ disarmed and com-
mitted to remote reservations. To all appearance Auberon,
at eleven, was, for his size, a Christian as little perturbed by
the volcanic part of Christianity as any whose spirit dozed
luxuriously in the warm sunshine of augustly lustrous words
and music under the mellow Old-Masterish windows of
Gistleham Church.

XIII

Molly, now fourteen, was to go North, to one of the
great modern public schools for girls, in the same term that
Auberon went South, to Brereton’s highly reputed prep-
school on the Channel coast.

For both of them the event was too enormous, too epoch-
ending and too devastating to be faced in any spirit but that
of callous jocosity. Both were afraid, perhaps, of being
unbearably moved. Bron went a day before Molly. He
started just after their middle-day dinner. It is the least
emotional hour of the day; your blood, I suppose, is busy
attending to some vital affairs of the intestines; it cannot be
bothered to bring up fuel to stoke fires of love and grief in
the brain. All day, as the bad hour came nearer, time had
seemed to Bron to slide away ungraspably; it felt like
sculling up stream in a flood, when the water slips away
from your sculls; they can’t grip it

48 ROUGH JUSTICE

All the morning the two talked trivial rubbish at intervals
— irrelevant rubbish, exchanged almost harshly. In anxious
haste they put out every kind light that the trouble lit in their
eyes. Garth wondered at them during the last meal; could
they be shallow-hearted, these little beloved beings, from
whom he was cut off? Or were they really strong? He
did not know how stern he looked himself at that day’s
winding-up of the long failure of his own baffled affection.
So, at this meal where love was, there was nothing of love’s
forthright warmth. Each enisled in his separate pain, each
aching with tenderness for the two others, they ate together
in grim silence the last of those middle-day dinners of
childhood which all of them could dimly see now to have
been of the nature of sacraments, mystical and enchanting
in retrospect, and irrecoverable now.

“ Good-bye. We part in peace ” was the nearest that
Bron came to an utterance worthy of the moment: this in
the hall, before he finally went out. His father had already
taken his seat in the carriage, to give them their chance.

“ Good-bye, old Bron,” said Molly. Then she was
convulsed and retreated abruptly into the depths of the house.
The captaincy of her soul was only regained just in time for
her to rush out again to the door and wave both arms to the
carriage, now moving. Bron stuck out his head. “ Goo’
bye again, Molly I ” he shouted. “ Last glowing goo’
bye! ” At the word “ glowing ” his voice hung uncertain
between seemly mockery of emotion and shameless abandon-
ment to it. With this tremulous joke, they wrote in the
full stop at the end of their last chapter of childhood.

BOOK TWO

CHAPTER IV

I

W ITH no easy mind had Thomas Garth let Molly
and Auberon go. But what else could he do?
A sailor must live the life of his ship; men and
women must live the life of their own country. Private
tuition was the mere outer shell of an education: it left
nearly everything out; and none of tht fancy new educations
had yet given its proofs. So the old public school, whatever
its faults and absurdities, had to be used, for what it was
worth. But still Garth was uneasy.

The English world that he loved, and believed in, seemed
now to be failing, and failing first at the top. The common
people, he fancied, were still undecayed; his garden was
kept and Gistlebam ferry was rowed by men of the straight,
stable, diligent, good-natured breed of Old Adam and
Bottom, of Court and Williams and Bates. But those who
had once been its guides — ? The old riders seemed to be
falling out with their horses — fearing them, not going near
them if they could help it, shirking the old job of under-
standing their wants and sharing their slow, friendly thoughts.
As Garth saw things, the only right of captaincy that the
old ruling class had ever possessed was drawn from the
strength of its members’ love and knowledge of tenants,
labourers, servants, private soldiers and sailors, their own
lifelong comrades in rural economy, in sport, in the rearing
of children and in the chivalries of war and adventure.

Not that Garth despised our new rulers, the men of
directors’ fees and dividends. He admired some of their
qualities. Only he hated the way that most of them seemed
iXo think of the “ lower orders ” as so many wolves to be
Iricked or dazzled or scared into harmlessness. Almost

49

E

50 ROUGH JUSTICE

everywhere, among the well-to-do, he found a standing
assumption that things had finally gone wrong, that the
great days were over, the Goths at the gate, the end already
in sight; that nothing was left but to see that you and your
set did not “ get left ” while Old England broke up. “ Eat
and drink, for to-morrow we die ” — it was not said, but
that was the spirit; it broke out in a new type of flaunting
bravado of luxury, as public as possible, flouting the eyes
and the ears of the mob. That way lay war between classes,
the last abomination of all, the utter failure of England’s
family. The fatted caterpillars of the commonwealth were
gambling with what was not theirs. A demagogue of
talent had only to come to the front — he would easily drum
forth a host of the hungry and cold to make an end of these
maggots and of the cheese that they infested.

Garth hated the thought. Better be dead than see the
magnanimous, tolerant England split into two squalid hosts
of backbiters, and all the saving talents of Englishmen
thrown out of use — the sane earthen humour, the plodding
mother-wit that always arrived in the end, the gruflF old
good-temper in keeping discipline and in enduring it — all
the traits that had saved England so many times, when leaders
had faltered or luck failed.

What were her old leaders doing to save her from that
sorry fate? Many deserting — streaming across from the old
thoroughbred camp to make any terms that they could with
the queer no-nation Midases that were coming to town in
those years from South Africa, jingling in their pockets the
profits of the agony and bloody sweat of better men. Garth
was a visualiser; the latest change in the state of England
presented itself to his mind in the visible figure of a great
lady, serene and regal to look at, posting off in a hansom
into the City after a hurried breakfast, to cadge from an
unsightly company-rigger, hfer guest of last night, the latest

BOOK TWO

51

tip for a flutter in diamonds or gold, rubber or cycles or oil,
or whatever dirty gamble was “ booming ” at the moment. •

Into the first ante-chamber to this world of tumbled plumes
and tarnished shields he had just t mown his son and his
ward. Could there be much hope c f keeping up any clean
and sturdy tradition in schools where the young of the
capitulating upper caste would prol ibly be overcrowed by
the pushing progeny of its trashy capt )rs or supplanters? He
supposed his jolly, natural, uncommon Bron, who could
have chatted and joked about plain things with Chaucer or
Shakespeare, would now be planed and trimmed down to a
stock pattern. His racy, coloured talk would be taken
away; he would be pumped full of witless conventional tags —
first the words and then, perhaps, the thoughts as well, of
imitative dullards and vulgarians.

Molly, too? Would her famous school on the Fifeshire
coast send her back at eighteen an indistinguishable unit in
any of the bevies of drearily frisky young women with dead
bluish-white noses whom Garth was beginning to notice in
people’s drawing-rooms, aping, as it seemed, the manners and
looks of the London barmaids of his youth?

II

The thought that you may have failed to give two young
creatures their chance of a fair run, for their only time on
earth, is not the best companion to live with. Nor is a
vacuous house by the Thames the cheeriest place in winter
for this cohabitation. A mild and still humidity hangs
heavily over the valley, month after month. The effect is
one of immobile and listless eternity. It helps you to feel, if
your own thoughts are running that way, as if the aflrairs you
most cared for were wound up for ever, your business done
and nothing left but to moulder like everything about you.

Garth, however, was not the man to let himself wallow

52

ROUGH JUSTICE

in warm baths of melancholy. Finding the new emptiness
of his house too hollowly resonant for his good, he gave
himself less of it. He increased his stodgy work to about
twelve hours a day, dined out more than he had done since
his wife’s death, and looked up old friends of his youth from
whom he had drifted apart. On most nights he slept at the
Chantry in a small dressing-room next to the room that had
been Winifred’s. But now he retained a bedroom at his
club, where he could turn in when work or some social
engagement kept him in town very late.

Saturdays and Sundays, with their vacant hours, were the
trouble. But Saturday afternoons were soon provided for.
Garth found a satisfaction for one of his hungers in a kind of
one-sided conversation with crowds at places where Londoners
relax their work-a-day reserve in the happy ease of their
spectatorship of sport; Now and then he would bring off
a shot with both barrels by asking some one with whom he
had played football at school or Oxford, and whom he had
scarcely seen since, to join him and some thirty thousand
others in watching the great League match of the day:
Clement Wade, for example, that sterling “ Soccer ” forward
at the ’Varsity, now a famous Liberal journalist in London.
That was a great idea. Garth felt, as soon as it occurred to
him. Why had he never thought of it before? Wade would
delight in the wonderful play and in the thirty thousand
lookers-on: he would be in his element: he would fraternise
with the people.

Ill

Wade came, tall and gaunt as ever, but half-bald and
grizzled, with blinking eyes and a stoop. He had the high-
pitched, remonstrative voice that you hear from some dons
who feel that they must be patient with this stupid world,
but not weakly patient. His manner at luncheon showed a
touch of surprise at Garth’s choice of entertainment for this

BOOK TWO

53

afternoon of reunion. His note of acceptance had been
curtly cordial, the note of a consciousi^ overworked man.

On the ground they sat at one fli. nk of a huge covered
stand. A low partition separated "hem from the thirty
thousand devotees who had paid their shilling apiece to stand
up for the whole afternoon. “ Coloss il ! ” Wade murmured,
surveying the vast bank of white fac- s that sloped upwards,
all round the ground. “ Colosseal! Imperial Roman! ”

A famous Lancashire team were to play the best that
London could show. Just beyond the partition a party of
cloth-capped Bolton mill-hands were whiling time away with
funny stories. One man triumphantly curled the tail of his
yarn and then turned to a friend. “ Thy turn, lad,” he
said, and the friend came out, like a shot, with a tale about
a dog of his own — how it always got a-gate o’ barking when
any one came to t’ house, and how a friend of his, one o’
them nervous lads, had come round, one neeght, and rapped at
door. “ ‘ Coom in,’ says I, ‘ coom in, Ben, lad.’ Ben
hadn’t nobbut oppen’t door a teeny crack when dog oops
an’ flees at crack, barkin’ like. ‘ Coom reet in, Ben,’ says
I, ‘his bark’s worse than ’s bite.’ ‘Aye,’ says Ben,
know that, ahl reet. But does dog know? ’ ”

Garth listened. He liked the yarn and the quick laugh
that received it He liked these men. At sunset yesterday
they must have been standing at work in the electrically
lighted mist of some reeking factory, two hundred miles
away; all night they would have travelled in their boots by
slow “ trip train to-night they would do it again; they
would reach their beloved, unlovely town among the Pennine
moors in the haggard November dawn, still looking out on
life and its humours with amused, unjaded eyes. That was
our strength and our hope — the hardihood of the common
man’s unfastidious gusto; these were England’s artesian wells
of vitality; they reached down to inexhaustible central

54 ROUGH JUSTICE

waters of eagerness and will to live. Clement Wade did
not seem to be taking much notice.

IV

From a cavern under the stands the teams came bouncing
out on to the ground in succession, with an air of dutiful
friskiness. Each was hailed with a roar, the home team
with a mighty roar of recognition and encouragement, the
Northerners with a lesser, but still a respectable, roar of
sporting hospitality.

The party of amateurs from Bolton-le-Moors had first to
scrutinise their heroes cannily, just to make sure that these
were no changelings. One’s dearest friends sometimes look
strangely different, away from home. .

“ Yon Gawstang? • Niver! ”

“ Aye, tha blind bat, thaj thot’s Gawstang. Can’t ’ee
tell ’im by ’is big be’ind? ”

“ Wheer’s Nickey? ”

“ Why, theer, on t’ reet.”

“Wot! ’Im that’s spittin’?

“ Aye.”

“ Thot’s reet, Thot’s Nickey.”

As soon as the work of identification was done, that of
adjuration began. “ Good ol’ Bowton! ” “ Let ’em ’ave it,
Nickey! ” “ Shove thy backside up agen ’em, Gawstang! ”

Their speech was as gross as earth and yet, like the earth,
rudely clean; a kind of coarse health of the spirit showed
through it.

Everywhere round the little Lancashire gang was the
Londoner, less loud, less forthright, less sociable, keeping
himself to himself, and yet civil, patient, quick to light up
at a glint of comedy.

Garth had not been in a crowd for some weeks. He felt
a familiar warmth re-invading his mind. It was akin to

BOOK TWO

55

the deep delight of looking out from a boat train, after an
absence abroad, at the Kentish hop-,L;ardens and orchards.
English crowds did not change; th y went on like the
Thames and the Chilterns; they were like old things which
art has caught as they passed by ami has invested with a
poignant imperishable beauty — the so igs and the jesting in
old Shallow’s Gloucestershire garden, the candle-lit frolics
in old city inns, the grunted dialogue of shivering carters
that harnessed their jades in a dark tavern-yard before some
mediaeval dawn rose over Rochester Garth’s power of
loving, stinted of certain other objec’^s, had fastened, with
all its disengaged strength, on this savoursome, immemorial
Englishness of the English.

A sky-splitting roar broke in on this reverie. Garstang,
of the ample haunches, had nattily kicked a goal, and the
whole party from Lancashire had instantly detonated to-
gether, like a single cannon. One of its members was
now triumphantly executing a few clog-dance steps; others
were throwing their cloth caps to perilous heights; soon their
separate impulses seemed to coalesce and they all sang in
chorus, “ Everything in Lancashire is reet oop to t’ mark.”

The Southrons, more conscious of class and correct! tude,
gazed, partly scandalised and partly amused, at these wild
cattle from the North. The Northerners, in turn, enjoyed
this comic effect of their own ardour on the primmer South.
“ Order there! I must have order,” a Lancashire humourist
said to his friends. “ Tha’rt shockin’ these quiet London
lads.” But the Londoners, too, had cheered Garstang’s
goal, and Lancashire’s chaff of the capital was all friendly,
in recognition of this piece of chivalry.

V

The whistle blew half-time. “ You’d like to stretch
your legs? ” said Garth. They walked a little, up and down

56 ROUGH JUSTICE

cavernous corridors, the darksome bowels of the huge
concrete stand. Through a door they caught glimpses of a
lighted bar, with glasses of beer pushed about on its sloppy
zinc counter.

The sight embittered Wade. “ ‘ Beer, beer, glorious
beer,’ ” he quoted gloomily. “ Is this what they come for? ”
Garth explained. “ A club owns the place. You or I
couldn’t buy a drink there. Only members.”

Wade smiled, a smile wearily scornful. “ Oh, yes, the
club evil. Is it quite beyond human power, I wonder, for
dubs to exist without becoming mere drinking-dens? ”

“ The Athenaeum seems to bring it off,” Garth pleaded
mildly.

Wade made the gesture of brushing aside an irrelevance.
“Yes, yesj of course. I don’t mean clubs for educated
men. It’s in these v/orking-men’s clubs that the bar is a
curse. They can’t resist it.”

Garth was not quick at dismissing as rubbish anything
that a friend said: surely there must be something worth
minding in what any one seriously thought, if only you
could get at it. Still, he remembered young workmen
whom he had seen taking their ease in their inn of an evening,
over their modest social glass; also a Loders’ Ball in his last
term at Oxford — some sots from a fashionable college had
come to it boozed and noisily drivelling: one of them had
trodden on Garth’s sister’s dress and torn it so badly that
she had gone away early, in tears, her hoped-for evening of
happiness spoilt. No, the feeble scrubs were not all of one
class. Wade must have made some sort of mistake.

They made their way back to their seats. Their Lan-
castrian neighbours had stood fast all the time, guarding
their places. The funny stories were flowing again. “ Mind
owd Bill Townley? ” one man was saying.

“ Aye ’E were a proper rough soart,” said another.

BOOK TWO

57

Mind wot ’appened to ’im,” said the first, “ ten years
ago, ’fore Coop Final? ”

“’Ada bit o’ trouble, ’adn’t he? ”

“ Aye. Seems a maate of ’is ’ad sp- ke out of ’is turn or
summat. So Bill give ’im a bit of attention. ’E was a
gradely boxer, was Bill — I saw t’ othrr felly’s faace when
Bill ’ad done wi’ ’im. T’ other fel y turned croosty an’
summonsed owd Bill, an’ magistraate^ give ’im a month on
t’ boards. It broke Bill’s ’eart. ‘ ( )w, Christ!’ ’e says,
‘ I’ll be in joog coom Saturday, an’ Wanderers in
t’ Final! ’

“ Thot maade chief beak sit oop. ‘ You’ve booked? ’ ’e
says.

“ ‘ Aye,’ says Bill, ‘ I’ve got me brief to Crystal Palace.’

“ ‘ Wheer’s ticket? ’ says beak, an’ Bill ’ands it oop. Tell
’ee it were dirty. Bill ’ad been feelin’ it with ’is ’and ’most
every minute since ’e’d got it.

“ ‘ Thot’s reet enoof,’ says beak, soon ’s ’e’d looked it
oaver. ‘ Saame block ’s me own.’ Then he leans down to
clerk. ‘’As this felly,’ ’e asks, ‘any right to appeal to
t’ Sessions? ’

“ ‘ ’E would ’ave,’ says clerk, ‘ if ’e ’adn’t pleaded guilty.’

“‘The stoopid felly!’ says beak. ‘’An’ then we could
ha’ bailed him out? ’

“ ‘ Thot’s reet,’ says clerk.

“ ‘ Prisoner,’ says beak, ‘ tha’st got to amend yon defence.
Not Guilty’s t’ word. ’Urry oop wi’t, now.’

“ ‘ But I done it,’ says Bill. ‘ I ’it ’im. Look at ’is
boko ! ’

“ ‘ Tha silly gowk,’ says beak, ‘ if ee doan’t plead Not
Guilty I’ll give ee two months.’ ’E turns to clerk.
‘ Theer,’ he says; ‘ enter t’ man’s proper plea.’ Clerk done
it. ‘ Prisoner,’ says beak, ‘ is released on ’is own ’cog-
nisances, pendin’ appeal.’ Soa Bill saw Bowton win Coop,

58 ROUGH JUSTICE

an* then ofl to quod, ’appy. Appeal? Noa, Bill didn’ want
noa appeal.”

This time Wade had listened: Garth noticed that. But
to what? To a squalid tale of brutal assault, of magisterial
misconduct, of universal preoccupation with a “ com-
mercialised ” sport? Or to the voice of English good-
humour, the old love of a game, a joke and a man who was
a “character”? For both things. Garth saw, might be
said to be there. There are both skin and bones in a head,
though rays of one sort of light will show you only the
skin, and another only the skull. Wade’s face had a look
of distaste. “ I never went,” he said, as the teams re-
appeared, “ to a bull-fight in Spain. But no doubt this
gives one all the essentials.”

“ Isn’t the bull an essential perhaps? ” said Garth. “ And
the feeble old horses? ”

“ Oh, yes,” Wade allowed, with a hard, wintry smile. ‘ At
the last day we’ll be able to perk up and say, ‘ We were
decent to beasts.’ ”

“ A good plea, too,” Garth murmured, “ so far as it
goes.”

VI

The game was running high; the crowd was held and
stirred by the keen play, as it shifted this way and that: the
sudden groans of dismay and quick sighs of relief thickened
into one continuous undulating roar that only stopped when
a Lancashire player was slightly hurt. The game paused
and the Northerners’ trainer, a podgy little cloth-capped
man, came scudding out from the cavern under the stand,
with a towel and sponge in his hands, and carried off his
wounded man, picky-back, to the edge of the turf. While
the trainer ministered there, the whistle blew, the game went
on, and, lo! in another minute a second Lancastrian was
disabled — winded in mid-field. The trainer looked up,

BOOK TWO

59

comically distracted by this second strok ; of fate. Then he
swiftly relinquished the first of his bartered nurslings and
flew to the aid of the second.

The crowd laughed sympathetically, as it watched the
little homely worried man. “ ’Orf gows mother,” a
Cockney near our friends said, “ to minv! the new biby.”

Next moment the London team’s t-ainer came fleeting
out like the wind, sponge and towel in hand and coat-tails
flying, to tend the patient whom his rival had had to abandon 5
and then, as quick as the amused and f; iendly laugh before,
came a clapping of hands from everybody, north and south,
in approval of this prompt little impulse of sportsmanship.
Garth felt himself to be absurdly moved: golden moments,
rare and unforgettable, when all the separate hearts of a
crowd give a little generous jump together, however trivial
the occasion. “ The great heart of the people ” — yes,
there was such a thing, though rhetoricians said so.

The grey light was thickening as the game went on, the
turbid rose-red disc of the cold sun sank sombrely into a
high bank of mist. All over the high embankment of
faces that rose round the ground the perpetual striking of
matches, now here and now there and always somewhere,
twinkled more brightly as twilight came on. Half closing
his eyes, Garth could see them, not as separate sparks but
as one wide continuous shimmer, like the radiant pulse that
beats in a frosty night sky. That, again, made the holiday
crowd seem more utterly one, as the firmament does when
all the stars seem to throb to one rhythm.

Garth glanced at Wade. Could it be that old Clement
was feeling nothing of this? But Wade’s face was chilly
and weary. Hadn’t they better, said Wade, clear out now,
before they got caught in the crowd at the end of the match
■ — SL hansom might be unprocurable then.

6o

ROUGH JUSTICE

VII

Wade’s spirits rose as the hansom sped eastward. He
thanked Garth for the little outing. Yes, we ought, he
said, to see these portents of our times. “ Only,” he
cautioned his friend, “ don’t confuse your football crowds
with the British democracy.”

“ Is there somebody else? ” said Garth, simply. “ Oh,
you mean the fellows who go off alone on their bikes on a
Saturday afternoon, to watch birds? They’re good fellows
too. And the ones that just dig in the garden? They’re
great. Something like success in life, to find the digging
business thrill you every time! ”

Wade smiled austerely: “ It isn’t, exactly the bird-fanciers
that I mean. Nor -even the amateur gardeners.” Wade
was undoubtedly cheering up as the distance grew between
him and the sight and sound and smell of that monstrous
crowd — so gross, so childish, the sport of trashy “ herd-
emotions.” Now, with the mob well out of the way, he
could see the real People again, the vast public meeting of
men and women who might or might not have read Mill
and Spencer, but were, anyhow, rationalists and utilitarians
and positivists in their hearts. To see the people, he warned
Garth, you must stand off a littlej else you would not see
the wood for the trees.

But Garth loved the wood, tree by tree — the adorable
oddness of individual persons in body and soul; their wilfully
independent valuations of things; their seemingly irrational
— ^perhaps super-rational — quests of queer grails which
struck them as holy or delightful Why, it was for that he
liked Wade. But how explain such things to him? Wade’s
Ups would curl; they would have that pitying smile; he

would say “ Oh, if it comes to mysticism ” and make as

if to wash his hands free of cobwebs*

BOOK TWO

6i

Garth did not try to explain.

At the north-west corner of Kensi igton Gardens they
paid off their cab and set out on the ever-beautiful walk
across the three parks to Pall Mall. Dusk had come; as
they penetrated the depths of the Gardens the mist soon
effaced the lamp-marked line of the Bayswater Road; soon
the multitudinous roar of the street tra die softened itself to
a soothing murmur. They might hav been in some misty
solitude of the Andes, hearing far below, them the slow beat
of the Pacific surf on a sequestered beac h.

Thus abstracted from life’s sordid touch, Wade’s theoretic
fervour could let itself go. In a minute or two he was
extolling with true eloquence the hero of his visions, the
“ average citizen,” or “ common man,” as Wade called this
paragon: just, inoffensive, pure and wise — give him a real
chance and see how soon he would put to rights all that was
wrong in our present sad state. Garth listened more than
he spoke; he could not escape from that notion of his that
there must be something in anything that was seriously
said by a sane, upright man, and he knew Wade to be
that.

They passed into Hyde Park. Couples were whispering
here, plastered close to the trunks of big trees; a girl and a
tall soldier, hardy with passion, lay embraced on the damp
grass. Wade’s flow of eloquence flagged: here was life
failing again; it refused to live up to his austere visions; it
showed only creatures sensual, shiftless, uncontrolled — beings
for whom there was nothing to do but tighten many laws so
as to save them from making a bet or buying a drink, or
spitting on the ground or leaving bits of orange-peel in their
wake, not to mention sins more grievous. He quoted sourly
from Taine’s book about England a note on the shameless
loves of Guardsmen in Hyde Park, What possessed us to
keep whole battalions of Guards in London at all} Was it

62 ROUGH JUSTICE

merely to give electric shocks to travelling Frenchmen’s
sense of decency?

Wade came of the business patriciate — the traders of old-
standing wealth and high civilisation, the breed that had
fought their way into a place in the sun, some seventy years
before, the men of the Reform Bill and the Anti-Corn-Law
League. There lingered in him still the resentful instinct
of a snubbed, insurgent class against a dominant and in-
dolently snubbing one. It was apt to blaze out at any
reminder of the Army, the Navy or diplomacy, the services
traditionally officered by the sons of the enemy, the old
owners of the land. So now the waters were let loose and
Garth contributed less than ever to the talk. Official life
had taught Garth plenty of things that would now have
served only too well to illustrate Wade’s diatribe against the
War Office. But Garth held his tongue. Wade needed
no spurring along his favourite road. Garth had insensibly
cast himself in late years for the part of a moderator, a blower
of froth off all the various full flagons of rhetoric, a doer or
remembrancer of things which the fiery braves of all parties
were apt to neglect in their fine frenzies of antipathy.

Only at Hyde Park Corner was Wade’s flow of words held
up for a minute, while they committed themselves to the
little sea of traffic-swept roadway and navigated its jostle and
swirl of cross-currents. Beyond it the shades of the Green
Park swallowed them up and Wade could safely be pungent
and trenchant and scathing and aphoristic and antithetic and
epigrammatic again. More and more his talk was of abstract
things ending in “ ism ” — nationalism. Imperialism, mili-
tarism, Caesarism, many more ; he marshalled and reviewed
them; he made them march and countermarch and contend
and react; he shifted them hither and thither like children’s
bricks and lead soldiers, which are so easy to move as you
will.

BOOK TWO

63

Garth looked on, civilly and patiei tly, at this intellectual
war-game. He was too proud to c aim his fair half of a
talk or to want to print any idea of his upon any one else’s
mind.

“I’m afraid I’ve been gabbling, said Wade, as they
parted in Pall Mall, each to his ch.b. He spoke with a
compunctious little smile that was rather engaging, a little
gleam of frosty sunshine flickering up on his hungry,
arrogant face. “ You always listent d too well. You be-
trayed us all into chattering.”

Garth said, quite sincerely, “ I like to hear about things.”
He shook hands warmly at their farewell. Wade might say
what he liked; he would still be a friend of Garth’s youth
and an irreplaceable piece of the past. Had they not rowed
in the same boat at school?

CHAPTER V

I

W HILE he dressed in his attic room at the club
Garth stood up manfully, at the sessions of silent
thought, for old Wade. Even if he had not been
old Wade, Garth would have had to make the best of him
now; to do anything else would have been scrubby, like
slating a man who has just left the room, after letting him
talk and never withstanding him to his face.

But what a lot of people Wade seemed to dislike, with all
his love of humanity at large — not even of one nation only.
Garth thought of the old Sophists, the fellows who taught
wisdom — perhaps taught it quite decently well — and yet
had it not. Could one be a philanthropist without love.^
Or a humanitarian without much humaneness? Perhaps.
Besides, Wade was sound timber; he worked for great ends,
as he saw them; he did not live softly, nor scheme for him-
self. Besides, there was something stout in the way that
Wade kept up his end. Most of those wealthy old Liberal
clans, indeed most of the men of Wade’s own, had bought
big estates, and then the older rural caste had put its women
on to them and they had intermarried and quietly fused them-
selves into the territorial breed that they had envied and
drubbed; and then they had taken the line that gave them
the most social ease and had become, by “ protective assimila-
tion,” the bluest of Tories. Wade was tougher than that,
anyhow; he was a good old wild elephant, not to be coralled
nor coaxed into tameness by females. If you could say as
much of all the men in a nation, that nation could do
anything. Besides, they had rowed in the same boat at
school, and they had been at Oxford together.

Garth left his window open, after his custom. Through
it there penetrated gleams and sounds of mid-London, awake

64

BOOK TWO

65

for the night; lights near and far; and a bugle blowing
from the barracks, across St. James’s Park, its remote and
melancholy call; and the ceaseless I4 :ht thud of the feet of
horses drawing inaudible wheels, a *:hud that came lively
and quick from hoofs that trotted tree in the Mall, but
slow from a corner below the wind *w where every horse
was pulled in for the turn. What a stir it had made in his
mind long ago, whenever he came up to town from Oxford,
this vesper London all a-tingle with flitting lights and festal
hastening. “ This is life, life! ” — he had always felt, exult-
antly, then, as his hansom shot out from under the roof or
Paddington Station. Wade had come up with him once;
the two had gone to the play and seen the rising star of
Irving, and heard the chimes at midnight together. No,
there couldn’t be much wrong with old Wade. And now
he was to see the other thing; he was going to dine in
Audley Square with Mrs. Barbason, the mother of Claude
— a portly and predominant person: thanks to the death of
her good man, a dull fellow and a sad drag on her socially,
she had become of late one of the most militant hostesses of
the Conservative party.

II

Garth met at her door Lord Wynnant, the old ambassador,
better known by his old name of Horace March. Him a
pretty and insignificant cousin of Garth’s had married long
ago and enriched with two sons, the younger of them the
lively Colin whom you know. Wynnant’s elderly face, white
but far from austere, had a moustache that sank the wearer
of any common moustache in despair. You could not have
thought beforehand that there was such beauty in any
moustache as resided in those two light wisps of blond hair,
blown horizontally out, as it were, in two delicate and tapering
streamers to right and left. The rest of his face had the
regulation lines of the blood Englishman — the modelling of

66 ROUGH JUSTICE

nose, chin, lips and eyes — only, somehow, a little bit over-
done, as if some handsome but very slightly raffish actor
had got himself up as a Bohun or a Mowbray of the
prime.

“ Thomas,” said Wynnant, with the ambrosial smile that
he always had when he spoke — under the moustache it
looked like a pretty woman’s vivacity in the shade of a
bright parasol — “ let us cling together closely to-night.
These good Tory ladies’ feasts are becoming absolute
morgues. Wailing and gnashing of teeth. To eat at such
boards a man must have the supports of friendship as well as
of religion.”

Sure enough, the times were gloomy, in houses like this.
There was no longer a Boer War now to busy the giddy
minds of the crowds once more the vulgar were raising
prickly questions at home; Lord Salisbury, the sturdy old
lion of the Conservative party, had died; his frailer suc-
cessor’s Ministry was falling to pieces; resignation followed
resignation; every by-election brought a new loss and a
darker portent. Clearly a smash was coming, whether a
remediable minor smash, like the last little victory of the
Radicals, or the smash, the grand final smash that must come
at some time or other, the break-up of Empire and of all
things good, the penalty of all the years of pandering and
truckling to the mob.

Wynnant was right. They were to have it all out; over
the very soup the inquest on the departed glory of Israel was
reopened. Mrs. Barbason’s explanation was trenchant and
brusque — ^just that Incarnate Evil, the Ancient Prince of
Hell, had arisen again, in uncommon good fettle this time.
Oh, he would do plenty of harm. And then we should
shake off our sloth and take a short run and kick him back
again to his own place. It sounded so simple. The lady
was much given to simplifying as well as to those abrupt

BOOK TWO 67

freedoms of speech that easily pass as wit from the lips of
masterful dowagers, the e sprits forts of dull circles.

Too simple, Wynnant suavely sug[ ested, always with the
ambrosial smile at play between the t.iir grizzled moustache
and his fine shapely teeth. Wasn’t trie whole world chang-
ing? — Richard Strauss coming to L( ndon to make all our
old music sound stale; stockbrokers casting ofi^ care and
singing “ Let’s go a-Maying ” and u liking to Brighton for
prizes coram populo\ newspapers gi\ :ng up print, to have
pretty pictures instead; some people putting down their
carriages — trying to get about in these new motor-cars that
always had the driver lying supine on the road, underneath
them, gazing adoringly up at their vitals; all the world
cheering up, larking about, attempting the light touch — and
turning, perhaps, from “ us steady old people ” to give a fair
chance to the Strausses of public affairs, the red-hot fire-
carriages of politics? Unprejudiced, unprincipled, Wynnant
poured out his frivolous stuff — piled it up into a sort of
rickety dam, to keep the more serious sorts of foolishness
from utterly flooding the conversation.

Vain attempt, he knew well. His own wife had her
solemn ntaiserie to contribute. “ I may be utterly wrong,”
she said in a weary way that she had, “ but I carl’t help
thinking the country — the real England, you know — must
hate all this court we’re paying to France — ^and it not three
years since the Kaiser was so nice in coming to dear Queen
Victoria’s funeral! After all, the French are Republicans
still, however we try to blink it. Why should we turn to
them now, and away from all our dear Queen’s relations?
Horace and I were absolutely happy at Berlin — happier far
than at Paris, although of course at Paris the big Embassy
garden is lovely. The Prussians, you know! Their loyalty
to their King! And their discipline! — so unlike the wild
street driving in Paris, which really does explain the regicide

68 ROUGH JUSTICE

and the Terror and Jacobinism and everything. Honestly,
can we blame English people for feeling the French are not
quite the friends they would care to be seen walking with?
It might be those awful Americans next. And if ever there
came a great war, we might have all the rag, tag and bobtail
of the world hanging on to our coat-tails and boasting they
were our allies.”

Wynnant’s face remained demurely inexpressive during
this performance of his dame’s. He looked across at Garth,
as if to ask for his fair share of credit for taking it well —
“ See how stoutly I bear our common cross, yours and mine,
of a connection with this foolish lady.” But Garth gave
no answering look. And then their hostess burst in, with
her hustling robustness. “ A great war? — that’s all we
need — ^all of us. Bu-t the dregs need it most. They’re
simply flabby with comfort — absolutely uppish and pert
with sheer safety. They need a life-or-death job, in the
field, to let ’em see the hole they’d be in if they hadn’t
their betters to lead ’em.”

Garth listened. He tried to find all the rightness he
could in the good woman’s words. He rummaged his mind
for recollections of any recent feats of born captaincy in our
nation’^ aflFairs. Nothing came to hand except a sight he
had seen lately — the Prime Minister speaking to a great
Lancashire crowd. He remembered the slack, charmful
figure poised and swaying on the platform — a, gracious
dilettante, a lovable sceptic, a courtly toyer with delicate
doubts and amateur of drams of intellectual exhilaration —
struggling to give a lead, in urgent matters of national
practice, to the thousands of blunt realists before him — ^and
these trying equally hard to get some guidance from him,
going half-way to meet it and greet it if only it would come;
but no guidance coming; no lead that a plain soul could
follow; and then the little bursts of cheers coming farther

BOOK TWO

69

and farther apart as the meeting w mt onj the audience,
that had been all ears at first, lapsing at last into apathy,
for all its humble friendliness; the sheep looking up to be
fed, and no food arriving.

But Mrs. Barbason was surging along: “ ‘ Labour
leaders’! Funny phrase. God knows what Labour is to
them, or they to Labour. And ycr. they call themselves
‘Labour leaders’! A war would pretty soon do for them
all — them and their traitorous cant about peace. They’d
be stoned in the streets — that’s my p ophecy.” She turned
abruptly on Garth, who sat on her h ft, and put to his head
a pistol-like question: “ Am I talking nonsense? Or not? ”
“Well,” said that patient hearer, “you prophets ought
to know about stoning.”

Ill

There were only eight at the table. Enough, too. Garth
would have said: conversation ought to be general: of
course it gave bores a wider field for their devastations;
still, it made people stand fire; the old Spartan was all for
giving of proofs and winning of spurs.

Four of the eight you know. The rest were Colonel
Hubbock-Orde, a lifelong War Office soldier; George
Roads, the new man, the owner of many new and aurifer-
ous newspapers; and the wives of these two. Hubbock-
Orde was undersized and wizened; he had a peaky nose, a
bad chin, a tiny moustache, mouse-coloured and waxed,
and little fidgety eyes. In spite of all this unkindness of
Nature’s he was conscientiously trenchant in speech, he
played with a will the plain blunt soldier-man’s part. “ Why
wait for a war? ” he cut in, with that Wellingtonian brusque*
ness. He’d teach these civilians. “ We don’t wait for war to
discipline troops. We get ’em in hand during peace. Same
with a nation. You’ve got an undisciplined nation, you

70 ROUGH JUSTICE

politicians. That’s your trouble. You’ve let ’em run
wild. These silly elections are only a symptom. You’ve
got to get your men in hand.”

Mrs. Barbason nodded approvingly. Roads found his
voice: he even detached his eyes from his victuals. “ How
d’you do it? ” he asked. No doubt he earnestly wanted to
know. He was an obviously underbred person of forty or
so, with too much flaccid flesh, and he cultivated a laboured
intensity of expression, like “ still strong men ” in weak
movie plays: under his pasty skin the flabby facial muscles
were industriously clenched; but through this screen any
observant person like Garth or Wynnant could see a flurried
little soul crouching or shuffling about behind it. “ I’ve
tried, myself,” he said. “ It’s all no go.” In fact all his
boundlessly circulating ha’porths of sensational assertion and
detraction had lately been used, in the course of some obscure
negotiation for a peerage, to prop up the falling cause. Yet
nobody seemed to mind. The sea rose and rose and poor
little Canute was bewildered.

“ It’s perfectly simple,” the Colonel said. “ Give ’em an
order — that’s all.”

“ Par exemple ? ” said Wynnant. Here was fun for

him.

“ Oh, any old order will do,” said the Colonel. “ Only
— see that it’s obeyed. Then give another, and see that
it’s obeyed too. And then go on doing it over and over
again, till they’re disciplined.”

“ You speak,” said Mrs. Barbason, “ the Bible truth.”

“You see,” the Colonel said triumphantly. “Any
order’s good enough to show who’s master. But why not
begin with National Service? And call it Conscription?
There’s no ne^d to funk the plain name.”

Garth’s mind clung to concrete things if he could get
them; if not, then to first-hand reports of them. So there

BOOK TWO

71

came back to him now a scrap of a dialogue that he had
heard by chance in a Dorsetshire ale-house; two sergeants
whose tunics seemed to record muci active service were
talking solemnly over two pints of b ^er; one of them had
said: “When I’m in a proper ’ot shop — same as you and me
was at Chitral — I don’t want no blo(Nly conscrip’ anywhere
near me.” “Gawd, no!” the otht r had answered, with
fervour.

Still, Garth did not raise the poin- “ Take each man’s
censure, but reserve thy judgeme it! ” — that was only
common sense; Colonels, as well as sergeants, deserved to
be heard about their own trade. So he said nothing till
Mrs. Roads, a stumpy woman with a blank blue and white
face, and many spiky confections of big diamonds indenting
ghastlily the dead-white fat of her bosom, said that the
person for whom she felt was the King, if ever he should be
forced to put up with a pack of Radical Ministers. “Just
think,” she said, “ of having to have them in his house! ”

Wynnant’s eyes twinkled. Even Mrs. Barbason, who
knew that Roads had to be patted and stroked for the good
of the cause, smiled rather cruelly at the poor woman’s
assumption of a right to sympathise with the social agonies
of the august. But Garth was always almost helplessly
merciful to people helplessly absurd. “ Oh, come,” he re-
monstrated gently, “ Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman is the
best of company.”

“ I thought it was he,” said Mrs. Hubbock-Orde, “ who
drove the Duke of Cambridge out of the Army? ”

The merciless humour in Wynnant’s fine eyes turned from
the first female guy to the second. These War OflEice ladies
from Hampstead were famous pasture for an ironist. “ Isn’t
that, perhaps,” Wynnant asked, “ what endears our ‘ C. B.’
to the King? ”

Mrs. Hubbock-Orde came as near to snorting as any prim

72 ROUGH JUSTICE

woman might. “ Of course,” Wynnant blandly went on,
“ he has less wit than Vernon Harcourt. Harcourt’s the
wittiest fellow in London. But ‘ C. B.’ has more humour.”

“ Oh, he’s a funny man, is he? ” Mrs. Hubbock-Orde’s
voice would have withered all Laodiceans and wits if it could.

IV

When the women were out of the way. Roads came more
fully to life and began to give tongue to some purpose. To
do this, he needed port, a cigar and the retrospect of a non-
irritant dinner. Given these things, God was with him
and Roads would unbend and give gratuitous tips to com-
panies of the kind with whom he dined in these latter days
and whom he held to be mostly fools, though he longed with
all the little force of his soul to be more like them. “ I do
wish to God that I could be a gentleman,” Roads had once
said to Garth in one of the confidential fits that Garth un-
wittingly inspired in many people who were merely acquaint-
ances, That avowal had bound Garth over to toleration of
Roads. What can you do when a man throws down all his
defences before you, even a man who ought to be kicked?

Roads had only one subject — himself and his “pheno-
menal ” rise, as he called it — the “ record ” circulation of his
prints. He must have felt that every one else was thinking
of this all the time and longing to know how it was done.
So it was with an air of doing his best for his friends that
he now proceeded to wrench the talk round to the one loved
theme. “ Study your public honestly — faithfully,” he was
saying presently. “ That’s the whole secret. That and
science.”

“ Science Siftin’s and sich? ” said the Colonel loftily.
“ ‘ Hours with a Microscope ’? ”

“Lor’, no!” said Roads; “there isn’t a cent in that
bleat.” He settled down to give golden wisdom away.

BOOK TWO 73

“ You just mark up your chart — that’s all. And study it
like Hell.”

“ What chart? ” said Hubbock-C>rde, still rather airily.
“ Weather? ”

“ Yes, in a way,” Roads explained. “ You mark up the
daily net sales of your paper — on a c irve — a diagram thing.
And then, some time when sales se* m pretty average, you
try a new feature — ‘Turf notes aid notions,’ or ‘Books
that have Pep,’ or that thing we’re crying out now in The
Day — ‘ The Bread of Life : the Ch ristian’s Daily Crumb.’
You keep it up every day for a fc rtnight and watch the
curve on the chart. Then you drop that feature for a
fortnight; then you put it on again; and all the time you
keep on watching your sales on the chart. The chart may
show nothing at all — the feature hasn’t mattered a damn,
either way. But now and then the curve goes up a little
bit during the second week of the fortnight the feature is
in, and down again during the second week of the fortnight
it’s out. Then you may — though it isn’t sure yet — have
got hold of a winner; so you feel round a bit more, just to
eliminate possible causes of error. And then, when at last
you’ve got a dead cert, you back it, all in, like a man.
Science and guts — that’s all there is to it. Simply keep your
hand on the pulse of the nation. Any of you men could
do it, just the same as me.”

“ Sounds logical,” said Hubbock-Orde, decidedly im-
pressed. “ But what about these rotten by - elections?
Didn’t your papers say we should romp? What was the
matter? All the curves got out of curl? ”

Perhaps the unconscious Colonel touched a more tender
spot than he knew. Science must have been urging Roads
at that time to make at least some civil gesture towards the
rising sun of the Liberal party. And yet the setting sun
held that half-promised peerage; it could not be forsaken.

74 ROUGH JUSTICE

And yet, again, the sun might set faster than science could
estimate — sink suddenly into the ocean, peerage and all
So Roads’ vesper serenity might well be a little perturbed as
he replied, “ Well, I’m a Conservative, same as every one,
ain’t I? And how would you fight elections? Put up on a
placard ‘ The Radical wins. Still, we’re open to votes ’? If
you had to make a last stand in a war, would you say to
your men ‘ Nothin’ doin’. We’re licked. Still, you can
fire away if you like ’? ”

There was something in that, the Colonel allowed.
“ Mind you,” Roads went on, “ when I say that I’m a Con-
servative, I don’t say I’m a stick-in-the-mud. I’m out to
face facts every time. If it do turn out that all England is
turning right round at this next general election — mind, I
don’t say yet that it is, but still, if the good old Conservative
cause should become a back number, for keeps, same as the
crinoline — well, I don’t say but I might have to go with the
country. ‘ My country right or wrong,’ you know — that’s
good enough for me. Fact is. I’m just off to Algiers for a
month or two now, to think it all out, and I’m just giving
my editors one simple order for while I’m away: ‘ Be fair to
all parties, til! further instructions.’ ”

You see, Wynnant was reputed one of the Prime Minister’s
intimates. Possibly Roads was discharging a kind of ulti-
matum into the air, to be picked up by whoever might have
his receivers properly tuned — “ Hurry up there with that
peerage. I can’t wait for ever.”

V

No doubt Roads instinctively knew his man, up to a point.
These animals live by such instincts. Diplomacy was
Wynnant’s trade, and an unfastidious sense of comedy his
recreation. To him Roads was an entertaining “ character
part,” a grotesque to be prized and guarded and egged on to

BOOK TWO

75

abound in his own line of grotesque ness. Certainly Roads
ought to have his peerage, or anytl ing else that might be
needed to keep him performing in these stupid old Tory
houses where such fun was scarce; Roads was even more
impayable than that quaint deposit of Time’s, Hubbock-Orde,
with his droll illusion of knowing h s own mind though he
had no mind to know. Roads was tiie prime low comedian,
the proper foil to that tall figure of 1 igh comedy. Garth, the
old lion who suffered the monkey, the ass and the parrot
gladly and never gave them up as no good. “ The Old
Stone Man,” Wynnant once said to me, “ sees us all rushing
round and yelling out how we’re the men who know what’s
what. He does know, and yet he keeps still — if he let on
that he knew, he’d feel as if he were swaggering round in a
cheap bookie’s coat with shillings sewn on, all over the front.
And yet, through some twist in his mind, he thinks we’re
worth talking to.”

To-night, when Roads had found his tongue, Wynnant
had quoted aloud to Garth a version of the hymn:

** Soon as the stars of night prevail.

Our friend takes up his wondrous tale.

And nightly to the listening earth
Relates the story of his worth.”

Wynnant was genially insolent; he relied on the dullness of
Roads’ wits and the thickness of his skin. But Garth took
it coldly. Garth was not joining his friend in the mediaeval
diversion of putting a half-witted clown, blind for choice, on
the stage, to amuse the house, between whiles, with his queer
capers and frothings.

Wynnant was not hurt by this coldness. Just the oppo-
site. Garth was all the more Garthian for being like that.
“ Every man in his humour ” — that was the only sound
rule — the way to enrich the great little comedy.

CHAPTER VI

I

G arth wanted to reach home that night. So he
caught the last train to Sheane: thence a riverside
walk of half an hour would leave him with only the
breadth of the river between him and the Chantry. The
ferryman would be gone home to bed, but all was arranged;
the Chantry punt would be lying padlocked to the ferry
landing-place, for Garth to take himself across. He often
did, at these hours.

You would not half express the loneliness of that river-
side walk at midnight in winter by saying you would meet
nobody there. Solitude can go further than that: a grave-
yard is lonelier than a meadow, and any solitude may be
deepened at night by the blinking of a light in some distant
window — by anything, in fact, that sharpens your sense of
being excluded.

The path was banked up high, for safety from floods;
along it you walked hoisted up in the air; you looked down
on one side to the river and on the other to a vast field, a
mile square, where kings used to hunt deer. It was dead
low water to-night, so the quietude of the stream was deep;
only a furtive occasional whisper from some trickle of water
breaking over a pebble below interrupted a hush that seemed
almost studied. Far out on the great stretch of grass an
old horse stood motionless, knee-deep in white mist, and
coughed patiently. Overhead, a broken line of big chestnut
trees darkened some parts of the way; now and then there
would just rise into hearing the faint groan or whine of a
bough chafed by some other bough that was too flabby to
hold out its own weight at arm’s length.

Garth was a Stoic, but not insensible. He gave to the
pressure of the hour and the place — ^at any rate so far that

76

BOOK TWO

77

his thoughts, as he stepped out on the walk, grew more
fluent without becoming less sombre The figures he had
seen since noon came up for his mind to review, and the men
delighted him not, nor the women e ther. First there was
Clement Wade, the inclement, the n.in of democratic prin-
ciple and anti-democratic heart, extoll ag the people’s wisdom
and hating its company, burning wit i a kind of chilly fire,
a friar’s lantern kindled out of mist^ and coldness. Garth
had known Liberals whom he felt to have got hold of some
essential portion of rightness — men f red with a mettlesome
glow of eagerness that the common man should have licence
to live out his life in a way of his own, if he chose, and to
have a fair say in the settling of things. That was virile;
that was the right check on any fool rulers who rode a country
always on the curb, in a perpetual funk lest it buck. But
these iced intellectuals whose creed was all “ Noes ” — a
litany of scornful disbelief in Empire, Army, Navy, in symbol
and tradition, in the rude patriotism of the simple, in almost
every little effort we made to keep up our end in the world.
“ Yes — yes, by God; I do believe ” — that was what ought
to light and warm men’s hearts — some animating fervour of
admiration and love for something or other, some passionate
sense of kinship with common, warm-blooded life and its
ways.

But where to find it? In the men like Hubbock-Orde,
the Forcible Feeble, stamping his weak little foot and crying
out for his poor little untaught will to be done? In Wynnant,
that jolly atheist, a king of unbelievers, to whom England
was an agreeable house soon to come down? Drink up
the cellar, eat up the deer in the park while any were left —
that was the wisdom of the Wynnants. In Roads? Poor
Roads, a fit object for pity, like all human guys, but also a
peril, a new breed added to England’s old parasites, a mosquito
that might lay waste a whole country while only trying to

78 ROUGH JUSTICE

suck a few drops of blood for itself. And those women at
dinner, not even waiting for a “ class-war ” to be waged by
the hosts from the slums, but waging it themselves already
with their puny poisoned darts — as if the first-class pass-
engers on an endangered liner were to send the labouring
crew a sneering message of defiance. Poor old ship! Poor
old England!

Since he had gone out of political life he had gained, by
no wish of his own, an odd new position close to its core.
One reigning statesman after another had formed an un-
accountable habit of wanting to know what Garth thought.
When they meditated their grand coups they would send for
him, just to see how these bright notions struck him. They
hardly ever struck him precisely as they struck the party’s
agents or its press. But more than once they had apparently
struck most of the electors afterwards as they had struck
Garth at first and not as they had struck those confident pro-
fessional diviners. To some of the great and wise — and
not in his own party only — these occasional conversations
with Garth had come to serve as exploratory borings into
that enigmatic mass of fundamental rock “ the mind of the
country,” about which they all talked so intimately, and
which they so sincerely wished that they could understand.
Neither sanguine nor soured, nor spiteful, nor timid, he
seemed to have attained a realism of judgement which was
more difficult for themselves. Besides, they soon found out
two things. No title, star or ribbon need be offered to
Garth in payment for these services. And any secret con-
fided to him was like a very small stone dropped into a very
deep well.

So Garth knew things not told to electors — the things that
were then whitening the hair of the best statesmen. He had
been taken behind all the showy facades. He had seen the
Navy, not on parade — the feuds of the Admirals; the flash

BOOK TWO

79

Armada of new “ super-ships ” on which the nation’s willing
bounty was being spent to placate a few greedy traders in
false news and public excitement while possible enemies
were working in silence to bring (-ur boasted super-ships
down to the status of fat bathers in a b ly full of sharks. The
War Office, too, — still just what he h id known it in his year
of service there — the eager, cunn) ig scramble for snug
billets, the pushing crowd of middlii' !; characters and brains
long cut off from the regimental life hat can keep soldiering
wholesome; the snarls and grumble, and intrigues against
the few real soldiers who tried to drag the sloths and the
shirkers along. And — who knowsr — a great war might
come.

He pulled himself in. What the deuce was he doing?
Maundering, thinking rhetorically, luxuriating in a warm
bath of voluptuous despair? A beastly idea! Truth, of
course, was never rhetorical, always mixed and qualified:
rotters there were, but the country still swarmed with good
tryers — splendid nobodies who kept the world going round and
said nothing about it; the sound England behind the flash
mask would always astound you afresh. Besides, there were
the young, with their magnificent chance. To Garth, as
he looked back from middle-age, it seemed almost beyond
imagination that other men should not make more than he of
the boundless opportunities of youth.

He wrenched his mind away, by a kind of force, from futile
melancholy. He made for his old refuge from the mean
slough of self-pity — the next thing to be done. Wasn’t
there some next thing to be done?

II

Yes, of course, he remembered it now. Wynnant had
lazily passed on to Garth a petition for help from the
headmaster of Chellingham, their old school, to which

8o

ROUGH JUSTICE

Auberon was presently to go. Curwen, or “ Tyke/’ the
famous old Yorkshire player, who had for twenty years been
the cricket coach at Chellingham, had suddenly died of
appendicitis. Could Garth, as an old cricket Blue, suggest
a worthy successor to Tyke in this great office? Rather!
Of course he would try. He would begin to try now. A
hundred yards farther on there was a long and floridly carved
timber seat by the path. He found it dry, sat down at the
end that came first and plunged into practical thought,
reviewing carefully such cricket pros of his day as had been
fit to receive the adoration of boys. There was Short, who
used to be the one pro in the Hallamshire team and, as
Wynnant had once said, its only gentleman too. And
Moulding, of Kent, a man of clean oak, fit to bring up young
princes.

From where he sat thinking, the Chantry was just within
sight: the light that burned for his return dotted the colour-
less landscape with one steady spark. Also across the
stream, but much nearer, were two larger houses. Dark-
ness had turned them into mere blocks of blackness, blotting
out details of surface and leaving visible only the figure that
each mansion presented in silhouette against the watery
pallor of the sky.

One of the two figures stood regally up to face this hard
test of the fundamental quality of a building. It showed a
noble assemblage of masses stately and reposeful; the genius
of its early eighteenth-century builder came out in the dark
like a star disengaged from its day-time obscurity. Seated,
as Garth knew, on a knoll made of gravel, it lifted clear of
low mists. It looked straight down an avenued reach of
the river, a kind of woodland glade half a mile long, turfed
with water. Gistleham Church and the Chantry filled the
far end of this divine vista.

The other house stood three hundred yards farther down*

BOOK TWO 8i

stream, and now exactly opposite Gartlt. Its sky-line might
have been that of a slum. Roofs, tow -rs and chimneys were
fretted into freakish incoherence; thev' were a dull tale told
by an idiot, a flow of architectural gibberish. This mess
was plumped down on the low alluvi il clay, almost on the
foreshore mud. It seemed to shur. of set purpose, the
ravishing view down the sylvan river avenue closed by the
pedestalled church and the embowerec Chantry.

It was of set purpose. Garth knew. He had reason to.
The fine house had been built for the first Lord Follett, the
Admiral, at the noon of his fame. The second house had
been built, only twelve years ago, bv^ the seventh peer of
that name. To Garth, as Chairman of the local Petty
Sessions, it had fallen, thirteen years ago, to send this noble-
man to prison for an indecent assault on a little girl, com-
mitted in drink. Follett had taken this sentence as an
unneighbourly and sanctimonious act and as a piece of dis-
loyalty to the upper orders of the nation. When he came
back from jail he used to say to such friends as would still
dine with him, “ Can’t stand this house. Not a Jack
window in it but looks bang down the reach, right into that
holy prig Garth’s bloody midden.” So, being rich enough
to spare himself pain, Follett had built house number two
and had sold house number one to the governors of a charity-
school for daughters of charwomen. The peer had cele-
brated his flitting with the only public benefaction of his
life. He had given for the public use — ^as it could not be
kept private — the seat on which Garth was now sitting.
Here Follett would sit on fine days, look across at his new
house, and chuckle over the way he had got the better of
Garth.

When Garth had done his practical thinking and had
provisionally resolved to recommend Moulding, he sat on
for a few moments, eyeing the two houses and fascinated by

G

82

ROUGH JUSTICE

that rather magical trick that the darkness had of subduing
some qualities in an architect’s work and laying all the stress
on others. Like adversity, wasn’t it.? It made the bigger
qualities show through. While he gazed he suddenly found
that an awareness of something new and strange was rising
up in him with steady swiftness till it almost shouted: “ Look
out! Quick! You’re not alone! ”

III

He turned his head sharply round to the right. Sure
enough, some figure was sitting deep in the shadow that
obscured the opposite end of the seat, close under the great
chestnut’s trunk. A moment more and he perceived that
the figure was leaving its corner and sidling furtively along,
still in a sitting position, towards himself.

Garth did not stir. “ Well? ” he asked harshly. The
furtive approach instantly stopped. By now the figure had
moved one-third of the length of the seat and was less deep
in shadow. It was a big man’s.

A kind of exhilaration began to tingle in Garth. Action,
risk perhaps? Life, that turbid and intricate business, seemed
to run clear at a touch from those elementary things. “ Well,
what’s your trouble? ” he asked in a voice rather less grim.

“ Wha’ the ’ell’s that to you? ” the man snarled.

“ Try sitting back in your corner,” said Garth. “ You’ll
talk better.”

The man jumped up, “ A six-footer,” thought Garth.

“ T(!?«’re damned regimental,” the man blustered down at
him.

Garth felt the glee that comes when some little physical
crisis sets your simplest faculties working above themselves.
How long would it take this fellow to reach him and strike?
As long as it would take himself to spring up and parry?
He did the sum with an exultant sense of leisure and ease.

BOOK TWO

83

By the time it was done, the man had flopped down at
the far end of the seat, grumbling sidkily, “’Go’s seat is
this? Yourn? Can’t a man ’ave a sit without bloody
parsons cornin’ roun’, baskin’ wot’s up with ’is soul? ”

“ Don’t waste the aitch business on me,” replied Garth.
“You’re a sahib trying to come th** low-caste. Is that
settled? ”

The man gave a grunt.

“ Well? Aprlsl ” said Garth. “ Have you got a re-
volver? ”

The man’s plebeian accent came ofi’ in one piece, like a
coat. “ You’re a pretty calm bird,” he said, in the speech
of the gently bred. “ Y ou trump my lead, first round, and
then you say, ‘ Got any trumps of your own? ’ Yes, I have
a revolver.”

“ Real thing? ” said Garth. “ I don’t mean a big briar
pipe, to hold by the bowl when you point it at people.”

“ You’ll see. And I’ve got something more.”

“ Meaning ? ”

“ Meaning I don’t care a damn. See? Whatever I do
now, they can’t give me anything worse to stick than I’ve
had. I’ve tried all the hells there are. Quod isn’t in it,
beside ’em. I’ve failed and shirked and cadged and starved.
It’s funny how strong you are when you get down to that.
You’re free from a rare lot of things. You’ve done with the
‘ sportsman and gentleman ’ business that keeps a lot of us
tame. You’re quit of the whole damn caboodle of old
inhibitions — that’s the word, isn’t it, now? Why, I’d kill
a King for what he’s got on him. I’d burn the Abbey down
to dry my boots. See? the desperate man, that’s what
you*re up against.” The fellow seemed to be trying to
work himself up to a great pitch of rage, without much real
force. He was like the old second-rate pirates who chewed
broken glass so that they might look bloody.

84 ROUGH JUSTICE

Oh, you’re a terrible fellow — that’s clear,” Garth dryly
said. “ It looks as if I should have to make you walk five
yards ahead, with your hands up, when we move on.”

“ And who’s to move me on, if I may ask? ” he snarled
like an outcast cur, vicious and weak with ill-usage, that bares
its teeth the moment you try to stroke it.

Garth asked, “ Is a bed of any use to you? ”

“ Bed ! ” The man almost gasped. Then the wariness of
the hunted revived in him. “ One of the canny Samaritans
— hey? ‘ Here’s the price of a doss, my man, so run away
and don’t molest me.’ Ransom — hey? No, no. It runs
to a bit more ransom than that.”

“ It did,” said Garth. “ I was inviting you to my house.”
He pointed down the avenue of . trees and stream to the
Chantry’s firmly shming symbol of bold action in a timorous
world. “ Invitation,” Garth added slowly, as no answer
came, “ withdrawn.” But, when the man now gave a sort
of groan of amazement, Garth added further, pro tern,'"'*

The man suddenly put on a different tone; he made a
fresh start; he sounded rather like a youth accosting the
distinguished father of a school friend. “ Is your name
Garth, Sir? ”

“ Yes.”

“ Mine’s Follett.”

Garth pointed to the big ill-favoured house across the
stream. “ Any relation? ” he asked.

“ The only begetter. Sir, of this masterpiece.”

Garth had heard of an only son of Lord Follett’s, a great
cricketer once but long gone to the bad and kept out of
sight by making him call for an allowance every month at
a bank in New Zealand. “ Did I seem,” said Garth, “ to
question your right to any portion of this seat? I apologise.”

“ It’s I should do that, I suppose,” Follett said. “ At
least to the Guv^ — for not doing you in. He had a good

BOOK TWO

85

old down on you. He’d howl out t ) me, when I was at
Harrow and home for the hols, to cone down to the pantry
— you see he was always sending th • butler away for the
day and then he’d soak Burgundy in t le pantry. He’d give
me a drink and then blither away about Hannibal and
Hamilcar and the bastard I’d be if I c dn’t get a bit back on
you. Spiteful old cretin,^'*

The outlaw’s voice had softened ciown into a lazy purr
that is common among worthless p -ople softly nurtured.
Garth cut Follett short: “If you’re dialling at home, I can
ferry you across.”

“ Home! And get my dole cut off! No, thanks. I’m
living on the country.” The swank was coming back into
the creature’s voice — he was always changing. Was there
anything real, at all, behind all the changes?

Garth fancied there was, and he wanted to know. “ That
bed,” he said, “ is still there. Are you coming? ”

Like a town sparrow, whose whole life is a panic, the
outcast seemed to peer all around for a moment before
daring to pick up this chance crumb of charity. “ I don’t
mind if I do,” he said warily. No overt snare had presented
itself.

IV

They rose and walked on towards the ferry. The witch-
ing hour had struck, some time before; on Gistleham
Church, the big clock had darkened its face for the night
and muted its tongue.

In the intensified silence Garth felt as if he could almost
hear the thoughts that probably passed through the mind of
the poor devil beside him. Were they not these — “ Now’s
your opening. Fetch him one on the point of the chin —
knock him out and then you can go over his pockets.”
“ No. He’s playing the game: so I must.” “ Mushy rot!
Take a chance when you get it. Pitch him into the river

86

ROUGH JUSTICE

— and then go to the Guv and get taken back and eat fatted
calf.” “ No, he’s decent. He lets me walk right along-
side. Just six inches nearer and I could get in a swing with
my right, full on his mug, while I walk.” Garth drew in,
half a foot nearer to Follett. So they walked to where the
punt lay chained to a great rusty mooring-ring beside the
timber steps of the ferry, slippery with a green nap of water-
weeds and slime.

“ Sit in the bows, will you,” said Garth. The forward
rise in the floor of the punt was usually cleaner than the rise
aft. That was all he had thought of, before speaking. He
took his own stand amidship, ferryman-fashion, to pole the
punt over. And only then it came to him that he had
made a slip. He would now be facing forward while they
crossed. His eyes would be on Follett. It was as if he
had stowed Follett for’ard so as to watch him. Better have
stowed him aft and so trusted visibly in the tattered rag of
schoolboy honour which Garth believed he still saw flying
over the wreck of this poor Reuben’s manhood. At any
sign that he was trusted, the sorry little flag had seemed to
Garth to take life and stream out a little and then again to
fall lifeless and go out of sight.

So it was now. Garth was hardly surprised when Follett
stood up in mid-stream and pulled out a quite real revolver.
“ This bloody rot’s got to end,” he said. “ See? ” His
first blackguard tone had come back in such strength as it
had.

Garth ceased working; he grounded the point of his pole
and held the punt up to the stream with one hand.

Follett almost screamed, “No bloody tricks with that pole,
or I’ll shoot”

Garth shipped the pole. The punt drifted downstream.

“ Got any money on you? ” Follett demanded.

“ Quite a good deal,” said Garth. His voice was almost

BOOK TWO 87

gay with that gleeful sense of having S( *mething only physical
and simple to encounter.

“ Ticker? ” Follett blustered.

Rather a good one,” said Garth.

Out with ’em — out on the fl( or, in front of you.
Then you’ll go overboard — swim for it — see? Bloody
swine! ” Like a shrew who works erself up to fight, the
neurotic waster lathered up his res( ution with words of
abuse. He kept his tongue going as f he feared something
might fail in him if it stopped for an i istant.

At the first of the squall Garth had braced a foot tightly
into the right angle between each side of the punt and the
floor. He had every leg muscle clenched. This fastened
him tightly into his place; he was built into the punt like a
mast; he could not lose balance. With no visible move-
ment of his body he now threw his whole weight first on to
his right and then on to his left foot. The punt gave a
sudden and violent roll from side to side, and the big figure
standing in its bows was shaken overboard at the first instant
of the convulsion. The splash of Follett’s entry into the
water cut short brusquely the last of several hysterical
repetitions of the formula, “ It’s you or I, you lousy swine!
You or I!”

Garth had not wholly meant to give Follett that ducking.
He had only risked giving it. Garth would have been
content to tumble the rotter down on the floor of the punt
and then fall to work on him there and disarm him. Still,
you can’t always measure out with absolute precision the
proper dose for sick souls. Besides, patient man as he was.
Garth had grown angry. What on earth could one do with
a creature whose moods were so helplessly discontinuous as
Follett’s? Dogs were not like that. And who, as Macbeth
asked, can be wise, amazed, temperate and furious, all in a
moment?

88

ROUGH JUSTICE

The anger subsided in Garth as he took up the punt-pole
and dropped down the stream. He would just make sure
the rat could swim, like other rats; then he would leave it
to shift for itself.

It was as well for Follett that Garth took this precaution.
For Follett was now only a black patch adrift on the rather
less black water. When Garth reached the patch he found
that the only emergent part of Follett was the middle of his
back, where all the air that had been inside his clothes had
collected into one leaky balloon of cloth. The head, legs
and arms hung down under water, at each end of this floating
patch, like those of a dead hare held by the back of its waist.

“Fainted! ” thought Garth, with a touch of contempt.
To set out to rob with the high hand, and then faint at a dip
in cold water! Old Jowett at Oxford was right — most of
the failures failed through never learning to form a sane
estimate of their own powers. Still, the stubborn equity of
Garth allowed, while he laboriously lugged the soused scally-
wag over the gunwale of the punt, that there had been a
kind of measly pluck in Follett’s last bluff. After all, the
crock had made his little effort to come the sturdy bully
over a well-nourished stranger. “ For all he knew,” Garth
fairly conceded, “ I might have been the heavy-weight
champion of England.”

Then things had to be done for the inanimate one — water
squeezed out of him first, and then his breathing restarted
by skilful violence. Somehow the doing of things for people
tends to make you feel some regard for them. All Garth’s
anger was gone by the time Follett began to splutter and
mumble a little and left Garth free to punt the half-mile up-
stream that they had drifted down from the ferry, Follett,
full length on the floor-boards, showed little in the darkness
but a white upturned face, like some queer Lady of Shalott
approaching Camelot by water — so Garth thought and then

BOOK TWO

89

felt rather clement towards the poor wretch whom he thus
saw as a guy in a burlesque. So G irth used his strength
gently in helping the drooping creature ashore and across
the Chantry lawn to the house.

The prodigal who thus came, not exactly home, but next
door, looked, under lamplight, ratht r like a big statue of
Famine, its face of white chalk. Hi soaked trousers clung
to his legs, bringing out well the shap*;s of the bones and the
absence of calf. The upper part of the nose and also the
eye-sockets looked anatomical, someh )w. “ And he played

for Middlesex once! ” Garth thought as he noted how
little tissue would have to shrivel or rot in order to leave
just a skull, with the proper grin of a skull.

Garth hunted out a suit of pyjamas and helped the starve-
ling to bed. There, when given some fruit and a little
wine, Follett became, in an instant, fantastically grateful,
then cried, and then, almost as suddenly, fell fast asleep,
with a quiet sigh and collapse into felicity, like a baby.

Garth bent over the face that sleep had simplified; now
that effort and thought were smoothed out, it looked young
and rather ingenuous and not a bit corrupt; indeed, just a
little like Auberon’s as it was when Garth had stolen in to
see him asleep on his last night at home. What a cropper
a man might come in his youth without having much wrong
with his soul! A few rotten friends, a bad patch in a house
at a school — that was enough, and for all the rest of their
one innings on earth they were left wondering at them-
selves like men betrayed.” And now Bron had got under
way on the course from which a poor devil like Follett
came out what he was.

V

Follett’s wet clothes stank. Clothes do when you have
lived in them, for several years, upon the husks that the
swine do eat. They were dripping dirty drops now from a

90 ROUGH JUSTICE

chair to the floor. But Garth knew of a sluggish furnace
that burned eternally in a brick-lined pit near the green-
house, as in a Temple of Vesta. Follett’s clothes could dry
there. Garth took them across the garden and left them
steaming in peace. Then he came up into the clean air of
the garden.

Night’s candles, such as they had been, were beginning
to burn low. Dawn would break in an hour, but the world
lay out dead still, as yet, as if its blood and colour had
ebbed inwards, like those of other sleepers, towards some
invisible and recondite heart.

Garth walked about as though there were something he
still had to do. But at first he could not tell what. Go to
bed? No, it was not worth while, for what was left of the
night. Nor was he tired; at forty-seven a man, though no
longer a racer, may be at his maximum of robustness and feel
neither youth’s nor old age’s exorbitant lust for converse
with the bed-clothes. Besides, Garth had lived, during the
night that was now blenching away into the past — really
lived; things had fallen to him to do, just because they and
nothing else had to be done. That was life, the real thing,
and his heart was astir with it, as it had often been in the old
and good times. And yet he was walking about, looking
for something.

Quite suddenly, as if some one had come close and told
him, he knew what it was. He was wanting to tell his
wife about the night’s little humours and thrills, and he was
walking about as if she were now asleep in the house and he
was not able to tell her till day. It often came to him in
that way, as if it were news, that she was dead and that all
there was of her now was her Bron, the small vessel that
she had laden with so many hopes. What if the dead
could see what the living were doing? Would she see
the boy waking up now in a “ dorm ” full of infectious

BOOK TWO 91

rotters, to do another day’s driftir g towards failure like
Follett’s?

Garth had stopped dead when th^: news came, and there
he stood till the lamp no longer -howed in the hall; a
sunless morning was breaking, blank md aghast, as he entered
the house. He went straight to his study.

VI

When the gift of speech had begun to descend on the
infant Auberon, Winifred Garth haci bought a little sixpenny
notebook, with a shiny black cover-*, in this her husband
and she had written down some of the marvellous things
which Bron, like other first-born children, was constantly
saying. After his wife’s death Garth had posted up the log
for a while. Then it had ceased. He now unlocked a
drawer of his writing-table and took out the book; he
brought it across to the window and drew a curtain for the
cold light to show up the fading ink. He could read there.

Here was a note written, in Winifred’s hand, the day
that Bron had been possessed with rapture and had capered
and whirled round the gardener’s bonfire of rubbish. That
was a great day. The wind had bent a few' little emergent
flames close down over the crown of the brown pile of
leaves and dead flowers and then Bron had cried out, in a
fine frenzy, “Horse pulling back wif his ears!” Next
moment, more of the dampish stuff had been thrown on the
pile; all but a little jet or two of visible internal flame had
been quenched in smoke, and Bron had soliloquised, in a
more sombre ecstasy, “ Smoke is the old lion’s bweath in
his cave, and the flames are his eyes.” Then Molly and
Bron had made the ends of sticks red-hot in the fire and
thrown them up against the blank stable wall as high as
they could, to make the sparks fly off and scatter. “ Suns
bweaking and falling,” Bron had said to himself, in a kind

92 ROUGH JUSTICE

of doating amaze, at a good burst of sparks. Winifred had
put it all down.

He looked on to the next note of hers. “ April 30, 1895.
To-night, when Bron had been bathed and was in his
pyjamas for bed, he spied the daffodils in the garden swinging
about in the wind — they had grown bright after sunset, the
way these yellow flowers do. He gazed at them quite a
long time and then said to himself, ‘Lamps o’ blooty!’
(beauty, he meant), over and over again, seriously and happily,
just doating on them.” Garth remembered the ache he had
felt when he heard that. Could nothing be done to guard
that infant power of seeing visions at the instance of quite
common things? The two had resolved they would try.
They would find means to arm their child against the coming
of the despoilers, the “ educators ” who quenched with their
perpetual jets of dead tradition and routine the delighted
spirit of youth? Little had come of it all. And what life-
less rubbish might Bron not be learning to-day — to put in
place of the fire and music and force of his first natural
speech? No doubt the usual dull jargon of minds half-dead,
the stuff that was imposed on any living wits among the young
lest the half-dead be put out of countenance. And the end
of it all — ? Perhaps to become a mere rat in the granary,
like the poor devil upstairs.

Amidst the undusted furniture of yesterday. Garth raked
the ashes of those old straw fires of delight and hope while
the dismal dawn stripped night of its illusive vesture of
enigma. The early housemaid who came to put the room
to rights for the day found Garth there at the window and
shrank back with a little cry, as if she had seen something
grisly. But he was perfectly dry-eyed and quite stiff in the
lip. There was nothing wrong with his voice when he
reassuringly bade her come in. He went off to the cold
bath that is so cold after these snowy-white nights.

BOOK TWO

93

At his solitary breakfast a letter was waiting beside his
plate:

Dear Favs —

I hope you are quite well. I am. ^ e played Cringle Grange
on Wednesday. Lost — 17 points to i . Buck major gave an
absolutely top-hole display. He got a :ry for us after a run of
I the length of the field. The XV. h :s played 3 matches this
term; won i, lost i, drawn i. Av rage points: for, 7*333
recurring; against, 13*666 recurring. B ick major’s average score,
in tries, 1*333 recurring. With love to Bert and all human
beings and beasties at home.

Your loving

Auberon.

Only two months at school and he was already planed down
to that. What would be left of him after eight years?

BOOK THREE

CHAPTER VII

I

B RON’S preparatory school was perched on a turfy
chalk down, above white Channel cliffs. Brusque
south - west winds were nearly always whistling
healthfully among its red chimneys; and this jollity in the
air was matched by the high-pitched breeziness of the way
the masters had with the boys. They fraternised and ragged
and chaffed; they laboured to have no pedantic nonsense
about them; they jovially took it for granted that “ work ”
was what every manly boy hated, and every sane master, too.
in his heart; it was the common enemy; still, with all these
rotten examinations about, a little work had to be done;
terms must be made with the beast. That was the tone of
the place.

It was new to Bron. In his sight “ work ” had not lost,
up to now, the glamour of a thing that gardeners and ferry-
men kept for themselves and would seldom share with small
boys who were perfectly sure they could do it all right. He
was so green that a new lesson had seemed like a kind of
new wild to explore. So he was soon in trouble. At
supper, his very first night, a malign fate led him on to avow
what fun it had been to find out about the old stakes stuck
in the river at home, to prod the Romans in the tummy. A
chill seemed to fall on his hearers. Claude Barbason,
already a second-year boy in the place, scowled at Bron
across the table. “ Mind,” he admonished him later, when
they were alone, “ you keep off that tripe about Caesar.
Unless,” Claude added, “ you want people to bar you.”

No: Bron didn’t. He was a sociable body. He did, as
he fairly confessed to Claude, feel a lovely sort of cold wave,
a kind of cool stroking, pass across his face whenever he

94

BOOK THREE

95

closed his eyes and seemed to see the old soldiers thresh
through the ford, and hear the spl *.shing and the rough
shouts. But Claude was making no terms with evil.
Auberon must keep off tripe.

The sinner tried his hardest to find the great affray and all
its combatants dull, instead of excit ng. It did not come
easy. Right and wrong in these thir gs seemed a queer sort
of business. Still, there was one joby good way out of all
worries. This was to let yourself go ' ke fury, at some game,
especially “ Rugger.” As long as the game lasted, you
didn’t have to guess what you might safely say, and what
you ought to keep dark: you just let yourself fling — every
bit of you; and then you felt as if you could break the world,
and a great peace came.

To his joy, no one pronounced this pleasure to be wicked.
Indeed, strangely much the opposite. Masters said amazing
things, “ Garth has courage,” he chanced to hear one of
them say, after a match. “ Yes,” the other agreed. “ A
lion-hearted little forward.” Queer! Didn’t they know?
As if the whole game were not for fun! As if there were
anything in it that any one could be afraid of!

Still he was always apt to believe that some one else
must know better than he. Other people’s minds were so
trenchant; they saw so clearly that they had got hold of the
right end of the stick! And then the way their disdain
could scorch up one’s own random notions ! — make them all
look hugger-mugger and dull in one’s own sight, although
they had seemed quite interesting and jolly two minutes ago.
So he loyally tried to work himself round into school ways of
thinking and talking. He was no wilful kicker or jibber.

At the end of the first term he was met by his father at
Gistleham station. Perhaps the father was nervously care-
ful: boys were said to hate being kissed on platforms; Garth
did not risk it. And then perhaps the coldness so carefully

96 ROUGH JUSTICE

assumed disconcerted the boy too and made him nervous and
careful in turn and anxious to say the right thing. At any
rate he rattled away, as hard as he could, in the dialect that
had seemed to be felt by everybody at school to be the right
thing. He explained how the school’s “ simply magnifi-
cent ” scrum half was leaving next term — this would be
“ rather a fag and how on the last night of the term they
had all gone to bed early, and this had been ‘‘ distinctly a
fag and how Bron had lost half his sweets in the train —
which was “ a horrible fag.”

The elder Garth listened as men do to bad news that they
have expected. Y es, that was what all Bron’s native wood-
notes were to end in. No doubt that was his thought. He
had arranged for the boy to have his brain deflowered like
others, and now the process was going on well.

II

In the fifteenth year of Bron’s age, and his first at a great
public school, his form were set to write an essay on “ Rivers.”
Bron’s ears pricked at the word. His prep-school had
taught him some caution; still, here was a chance; one
river, at least, he did know a little about.

He took a long time to the job. What he produced in
the end was a rather confidential document, so intimate
were its remarks on the enchanting private habits of his
beloved Thames — ^about the flinty sand floating off on hot
days; and the way changes came from time to time in the
unseen bed of the river, as you could tell if you always felt
about with your feet when you bathed, or noticed where
you had to fix your float when bottom- fishing; and how a
side stream coming into the bigger one edged the main
channel of the big stream farther and farther over till it
ate into the bank on the opposite side; and the way the stream
did not really flow straight down its course, but bumped

BOOK THREE

97

along from side to side, hitting one ba ik and rebounding off
on to the other, and so back again; ar d how you could drift
almost all the way up a river, up-streari, if only you watched
all the currents and nipped neatly across from the head of
one little coastal eddy into the tail ct another, and so on.
With care so extreme as to induce ht ivy perspiration Bron
fashioned his account of these and ot er tricks and traits of
the Thames for presentation to the wc ^Id. His fear was lest
every one else should know them all so well that his stuff
would seem trite.

A fine sturdy humorist was Mr Chaytor-Tonge, his
form master, as well as a fair reproduction, externally, of
Holbein’s Henry VIII. His fair round belly and red jowl
quaked like a top-heavy jelly with honest amusement while
he read parts of Auberon’s screed aloud to the form, with
facetious running comments. Chaytor-Tonge was in great
form that morning. Garth, he said, must have seen a
drunken man in a walled lane, bumping about from side to
side, and mistaken him for a river; Garth should look a little
closer next time he thought he saw a little river knock a big
one out of its way, or a stone going out for a swim;
Garth really ought to write a book, “ How rivers flow
up-stream.” Oh, it was great fun for the Middle Fourth
Form.

When the quiverful of darts had been duly stuck into
Auberon, serious business began. Colin March was rather
a light of the form at that era. Colin had taken Chaytor-
Tonge’s measure, and that gracious pastor now proceeded
to read out Colin’s essay, just to show the weaklings of the
flock the way to go about it. This masterpiece was studded
thickly with bright quotations about the yellow Tiber, the
blue Danube, the golden Tagus, the arrowy Rhone and the
shadowy Styx. As Chaytor-Tonge was great on patriotism,
Colin had curled the tip of the tail of his composition with a

H

98 ROUGH JUSTICE

really topping final tag about the world-supremacy of the
Thames —

Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet not dull:

Strong, without rage; without o’erflowing, full.

“ There’s the real Thames for you. Garth,” the admiring
reader appended.

Auberon had been feeling as a Chinese malefactor may
have felt when the proper authority took a firm hold of one
end of his intestines and wound them oflF on a roller, slowly.
He could not disown sights his eyes had seen. But a master
must know. Somehow, a master must know.

Colin denied it. Any fool less fat than old Tongs, he
said that night in the stuffy privacy of the study that he and
Auberon shared, would have seen in a jiff that Auberon’s
screed was the only, one not absolute bilge. Colin boasted
his own to have been the toshiest bleat of them all.

As to that, Auberon differed. “ You had a lot of frightful
good quotes. You must know half the books that there are.”

Colin hooted. “ You don’t fancy I’ve read ’em.? With
all the time I need for higher things! See — all that matters,
in books, is the tiny bits that everybody quotes some time
or other. And those all come in at your ears, in God’s
good time, if you’ll wait and not read. ‘Tout vient k fin,
k qui sait attendre.’ That’s one of ’em. You only have
to let ’em in; then they’re ready for slinging at Tongs.
It’s a labour-saving appliance.”

It seemed a good, wise plan. Auberon had seldom opened
a book when a row or a swim or a sail or a ride was to be
had. Still, he had lit, now and then, on some little scrap of
stuflF, in a book, that had excited him tumultuously.

But the lark’s shrill fife may come
At the daybreak from the fallow.

And the bittern sound his drum.

Booming from the sedgy shallow

BOOK THREE

99

Such things had to be repeated, over and over, hundreds of
times, the thrill of them making him ^et up and walk about
restlessly, longing to do something. Heaven knew what.
Yet Colin’s plan seemed to be wise.

“ Want another good tip? ” Colin r> sumed sagely, “ Look
after your adjectives first. The jus so adjective is what
Tongs wants. Gold is red, BuccL uchs is bold, taste is
execrable, villagers is apple- faced. Tiler is yellow.”

That seemed a sound notion too Bron took shame to
himself for having never thought of 'hat. Still, who could
expect to be as brilliant as Colin — except, of course, the
incomparable Victor?

Ill

To homespun wits, like Bron’s, Colin was certainly a
dazzler. In that, he was a true son of his house. Three
generations ago the clan of March was first heard of. Ever
since then it had abounded in marketable talent, diplomatic,
social, even artistic. A March had written notorious novels,
successes of scandal, that lived as hard and about as long as
super-impudent ball-dresses. “ Naphtha lamps on a booth
at a fair ” these works were called by Victor, now a brilliant
figure in the Sixth and great on keeping up Parnassian
standards. “ Absolutely,” Colin had said complacently, on
hearing of this valuation.

During seventy years of cabotinage and bravura the
Marches had picked up a peerage, a good deal of money,
though less than they spent, and a good-humoured contempt
for the more ancient and less vivid patriciate — the helpless
old world of good breeding and dullness that was now
crumbling before the assaults of the vulgar. Democracy
had covered the face of the earth and nothing was left to
choice spirits now beyond the grotesque adventure of keeping
afloat, every man for himself, in that comic ocean of roughs,
clowns and cheap-jacks.

100

ROUGH JUSTICE

Every March is a humorist and a skilled valuer. Houses
and diamonds, racy human traits and humours, the art of
gaunt Italian Primitives, the corruptibility of a politician or
a woman, the lustre of lives of ungarlanded toil or lofty
refusal — any March can appraise all of these with the de-
lighted eye of a keen collector. Perhaps that was why
Colin liked Auberon. Auberon’s impracticable little fad of
saying just what he thought must have tickled the born
connoisseur of quaint things. “ But, bless your heart,”
Colin admonished him now, “ it ain’t business. No demand
for it. ’Member the time you said that all the little different
emphasising particles in Greek meant what an English
workman means by ‘bloody’? Bible truth, absolutely.
But Tongs only raged. Same when you said that in
Latin tile meant ‘that,’ and iste ‘that ’ere.’ Tongs raged
again — he couldn’t stand it: much too true for him — too
beastly true to be safe — made him feel you might say
any damn thing next. Not business, sonny.”

There might be something in that. Auberon weighed
it. Everything was very difficult. If you said what you
thought, you got put in the stocks, to be jeered at. It
looked as if the sound line were to try to get things to strike
you, not as they did, but in some other way — more like
the way they seemed to strike every one else. But how
the deuce to do it?

He went so far at last as to broach the matter to Jinks, his
house tutor. Jinks was young and jolly; Auberon liked
having tea alone with him. Flown with that generous fluid
and with affection for Jinks, Auberon took heart and started
his confessions.

The smile of hospitality faded from the round red face
of the chosen father confessor. Introspection ! Good Lord !
In this little lump of health too! Jinks made a rush to say
something vaguely calming, as doctors do when they guess

BOOK THRFE

lOI

you have caught a bad germ but can't yet say which one it
is. “Just you throw yourself into the life of the house, old
son, for all that you’re worth,” said Jinks. “You’ll soon
work through all that distemper. Take it from me. More
cake? ”

Auberon took it, all right, as far as he could. He wanted
to take it. Of course his confessing had not gone very far
before it was so brusquely stopped. That was always the
way: before he could get his points ;>roperly put, in a talk,
the other person was getting out his, and doing it so well
that Auberon could only hold his tongue and admire. So
he took more tea-cake and tried to cast away care: there
was always the darling refuge of bodily effort — the sweeping
drive of an oar, held out to the end; the heave of happy
muscles straining away to the heart’s content, obscure in the
depths of the scrum: that was utter freedom and peace.
Besides, there were wonderful good little talks, now and then,
with Horace Fulford, the “ new ” cricket pro, a marvellous
man, simply tremendous.

IV

Fulford, you should understand, was only new as com-
pared with “ Old Tyke,” his monumental predecessor.
Fulford had come for the first weeks of May as a stop-gap
three years ago, and he had been stopping the gap ever since,
to everybody’s intense satisfaction. People said he had played
for New Zealand. He told you how to do things in a way
that made it seem as easy to do them as if your whole body
and limbs were turned into putty and you could shape and
twist them just as you liked. He could coach at footer and
rowing just as well, the swells said, as at cricket. It felt
as if the dayspring from on high had visited Auberon per-
sonally when Fulford went out of the way to speak to him
after a junior house match. Auberon had felt he was

102 ROUGH JUSTICE

playing harder in that match than ever before. Fulford
only said, “ If you keep it like that, you’ll do.” But, the
moment he said it, Auberon had felt that now he could go
on from that point of hardness to playing harder next time.

Another day Auberon, stroke in a junior house four, was
rowing a trial course, with Fulford coaching from the bank
“ Now then, stroke, none of that spurting ! ” F ulford sang
out when Auberon began, towards the end of the course, to
try to satisfy the public demand for such “ gallant and
repeated spurts ” as adorn most newspaper accounts of boat-
races.

“Sorry to snub a stout effort,” Fulford said in private,
later, “ but never hurry a crew that’s falling to bits with
flurry already. Of course people will gush ahout you if you
do. But you’ll let your crew down.”

Auberon’s face burned with shame in the dusk — they were
walking back late to school from the boats. Why, he had
known all the time that a good half of the old spurting stunt
was show-off — at least it would be in himself — greedy show-
off at the expense of his crew. He took his gruel silently
now, and when the race came off he rowed it like an honest
general, racing sharply for the lead and then steadying down
to ease his men and lengthening out for all he was worth
and rowing home quite unsensationally, lengths ahead of a
crew whose frantic attempts at a quicker stroke were drawing
hysterical applause from masters and boys.

“ A somewhat stolid stroke, yours — eh.? ” Chaytor-Tonge
said to Jinks, at the finish. Chaytor-Tonge’s house had lost.

“ He was a bit lifeless,” Jinks admitted. “ Still, the crew
were good old trusties. They pulled him through. But
your stroke was the man of the race.”

Fulford said to Auberon, “Good work! I guess that’s
how your father rowed his races.”

Fulford had said things like that more than once; it was

BOOK THRFE

103

the last word of praise, from his mout i, that the elder Garth
would have done a thing so. Whe i Colin overheard the
pro commending something to Aube ron in these terms he
eulogised Fulford’s piety. “All pe »ple that on earth do
dwell,” said Colin, “should prais< their creators with
cheerful voice. And I’m told your Guv created Fulford,
as chief cricket man here.”

“ Dunno,” said Auberon. “Only know that Fulford
was sick in the San all my first hols f om my prep-school.”

“ The San.? ”

“ The room my father puts men in — the ones he picks
up when he’s out.”

“ Visitors? ”

“ Well, the visitors whose clothes are full of beasties,”
Auberon explained.

Colin was hugely diverted. “ The Chantry dry-dock,
for tramp ships to refit in! I see. And then the reformed
down-and-out turns up in this place, chit in hand, and tells
them your father says, please will they give him a job? ”

Colin mused joyously. He was always elated by any
scent of intrigue, real or fancied. “ Is it true,” he presently
asked, “ that your father’s unsurpassable butler was first taken
on because he had just come out of quod and couldn’t hope
for a job anywhere else? ”

“ Dunno,” said Auberon, astonished. “ Who told you? ”

“ A gossiping world,” Colin purred. “ And that aged
cook at the Chantry? Hasn’t she got some glorious past?
Arson, is it? Or coining? Or just simple looting? ”

Auberon stared. “ How the deuce .? ”

“ Oh, it’s a wicked world,” said Colin. “ So the practical
question is — what has friend Fulford done? Murder? Too
many aces? Too many wives? Consider the evidence.
Your father is notorious for having the regal power of
‘ touching for ’ the King’s Evil (moral variety). Makes

104 ROUGH JUSTICE

each patient instantly whole and simultaneously finds him
a job. Fulford, a palpable sahib, comes to your house with
his do’ full of bugs. Your father feeds him up and makes
certain passes over him with his hands, and Fulford is re-
born and comes to Chellingham a pukka preux chevalier
who makes the common Chellingham beak look like a
billiard-marker. Question is — what’s his crime? Why
did he feed on the husks? Why cricket pro and not some
genteel occupation, as the world counts? A mystery, my
dear sir. I dedicate all my powers to unravelling it.”

V

That was rubbish, of course. Colin was no dedicator of
all his powers to anything. Still, it was ’cute of him, so
Auberon felt, to haye guessed so much more than he,
Auberon, had ever thought of. And now, if Fulford had
really run rather wild, long ago, and Auberon’s father had
taken a bit of a risk in putting him up for his job at the school,
then clearly his father might like to hear what a tremendous
success Fulford was. Auberon vowed that this week, when
he wrote home, he would go far, far beyond his usual list of
what other boys seemed to regard as the chief public events
of the day. He would even make a clean breast, to his
father, of that confidential affair which Jinks had bundled
out of sight the moment Auberon had let the tip of its tail
out of the bag.

For this gigantic feat of ice-breaking Auberon chose an
evening when Colin had some mysterious business in hand,
away from their study. The letter started all right: “ Dear
Father, I hope you are quite well I am.” All his letters
home, for more than three years, had opened with that
But then came the trouble. Better, perhaps, not plunge
abruptly into the novel topics — one ought to glide into
things tactfully. So he continued to touch, for a while, on

BOOK THREE

105

public affairs. “To-day the XV. ost to Marlborough.
They got ii points to our 3 — a topping try. Bellingham
got it.” That was what people wo ild probably want to
hear about. Masters had left the fiel 1 with their shoulders
bowed, after the match. Chaytor-T -nge was said to have
wept. No doubt adults, as a body, were moved by similar
passions, though Auberon, in his secret heart, had a
shamefaced way of seeing no more in a game than the
greatest of good fun; he simply coulcn’t sorrow much over
results.

But now he must work into his theme. “ On Wednes-
day,” he craftily wrote, “ we played our tie with Godley’s
in the Junior House Cup (second round). We won (27
points to 3). I played a pretty rotten game, but had some
luck and got three of our tries.” Now we were getting on.
Nothing needed now but just to slip in a sort of “ As we

are talking of me, by the way ” and so glide softly into

the heart of the matter.

But, Gosh! it was difficult. Writing about one’s own
old fixes and messes seemed curiously measly as soon as one
tried to do it. And once, long ago, his father had said
that “ a man should not speak of himself, except when
compelled.” He pictured his father opening this letter and
liking to hear about the Marlborough match and then liking
decidedly less that swanking, dragged-in mention of Auberon’s
tries, and then his face growing grim over the fussy self-
regarding stuff now about to be added. No, men shouldn’t
speak about themselves! But not even to their fathers?
Oh, everything was very difficult! Auberon still hung
uncertain, his wet pen dangling from his hand, when Colin
burst into the study, all radiant.

It seemed that Colin had just reconnoitred a new line of
ascent to the roof of the house. Just one good step out from
the sill of Bolitho’s study window and then you got yourself

io6 ROUGH JUSTICE

jammed in the right-angled corner between the two walls,
with your back against the big downcomer pipe and your
feet against the opposite wall. Thence a strong man could
“ back up,” inch by inch, wriggling up his back and feet by
turns, to just under the roof, but there it would want a
whacking long reach to stretch out round the eave and get
hold of the gutter-pipe above, so as to let go with your back
and feet, swing out free, and hoist yourself up with your
arms on to the roof. Clearly a case for a hefty gorilla like
Auberon.

Oh, sweets of action! How all meditation, confession,
communion pale their ineffectual fires at the rising of that
irresistible sun ! “ The nobleness of life is to do this.”

Yes, to do anything that can be done with a will.

“ One second,” Auberon said. He wrote swiftly on:
“ With love to all humans and beasties, your loving son,
Bron.” In five minutes more he was precariously perched
in the leaden gutter of the roof, stretching down one of his
notoriously long arms to haul Bolitho, the second member of
the climbing party, over the mauvais pas at the eave.

So Thomas Garth got nothing out of the way to read at
his breakfast next morning; only the same old letter, in
substance, that he had received once a week, during term,
for more than three years — about as filling a meal for a
lonely man’s affection as a collation of sawdust would b^
for an equally hungry body.

CHAPTER VIII

1

F or many years the day that reunited Molly and
Bron at the end of each term vvas always spent in
much the same way. Molly w< uld have come from
Fifeshire by a night train and Bron would have risen at
dawn — or, in winter, long before it- -to catch the earliest
of all trains from Chellingham, lest a single available hour
of home and Molly be lost. So they would both be at the
Chantry about ten in the morning.

There they would swiftly change into clothes that
“ didn’t mind tearing ” and sally forth to retake possession
of all that was immemorially theirs. Everything was done
in a regular order. First they would visit the nests of the
magpies in the top boughs of the beech and make sure that
the herons still came to feed at Misery Point and that the
brown owls still abode in the big holly and in the big yew.
After the mid-day meal they would have out the Chantry
punt and slowly and luxuriously resume enjoyment of
Retally Slack, the half-mile of shallow backwater lying
between the mainland on the Chantry side and the osiered
and forested Gistleham Ait. So far, they knew what they
were doing. No doubt a less conscious part of their business
and desires was for each to make sure that the other was
still the same good old partner as ever.

The last of Molly’s night journeys from Scotland was
made when Auberon’s age was sixteen and a half. No more
school for Molly. She was to work at home with a coach
till next autumn, and then go to Cambridge. Christmas
was near, and the two of them prosecuted their fond re-
conquest of Retally Slack on a veritable English winter
afternoon — sunless, windless, humid and soothingly grey,
one of the days that engendered fox-hunting and football as

107

io8 ROUGH JUSTICE

well as English roses and June verdure. The tide was out;
the fairway of the Slack was now only a chain of pools
nearly stagnant, almost cut off from each other by natural
sills or bars of gravel; over each of these little weirs a
shallow overflow of water, from the pool above, lipped
weakly.

Up over each sill in turn the two drove the punt. In
their watermanship together they seldom concerted a joint
movement consciously and never discussed one; they worked
like the right and left sides of a body, carrying out the orders
of its one twin-lobed brain. Now and then, when the punt
rode easy in a pool, this silent community of impulse would
cause them to knock oflF work and sit down, each at one end
of the craft, and exchange a few words absurdly inadequate
to the momentousness of the occasion.

“ Glad,” said Bron, at one of these halts, “ there’s no lock
lower down.”

“Rather!” Molly agreed. Whatever was, was good
just now. “ Why, though, ’spesh’ly? ” Certain words, as
pronounced by Bron in tenderer years, remained in use
between the two as a kind of private dialect.

“ We shouldn’t see the mud if there was,” he said. He
looked out doatingly over the wide tracts of greenish-black
slime that sloped gently up, on each side, from the edges of
the pools to the camp-shedded banks of the Ait and of the
Gistleham shore.

“ Some people,” said Molly, “ say our mud’s beastly.”

Bron’s congenital tolerance tried, for a few silent moments,
to find some grain of sense in this fantastic opinion. None
presenting itself, he said with conviction, “ Idiots! When
mud squelches up between your toes, you’re like a cat being
stroked. Besides, mud’s different from the gravelly parts.
I like things to be different.”

Molly considered this while they urged the piint over the

BOOK THREE

109

next trickly sill and the next and the next. In the glassy
lagoon above these they easied again and squatted as before,
each on one sloping end of the punt. The mild winter
evening was just beginning to muffl> them in with pale
wrappings of cobwebby mist that seem id to hush the visible
scene like some muted sound. Noth ig moved: overhead
the elms and huge Turkey oaks that f lied the upper end of
the Ait were like people holding their breath; the sky-line
of Gistleham village had begun to 1 lur itself softly; day
noises failed and the tranquil whistle i>f some man at work
by himself in a barge-builder’s yard rose clearer and more
melodious; a first light came blinking meekly out in a
window high up in the goodly abode, farther up-stream,
where the greatest of the Folletts, the Regency statesman
and buck, used to assemble fiddlers and roses and palms and
kiss his leman and drink deep. It was a nunnery now:
female orphans were trained by icy Sisters to wash dirty
linen and iron it in the famous saloons of the mode of Louis
Quatorze, Under the bank of the Ait the last of the gaily
bedecked pleasure barges of London City’s old livery com-
panies lay aground, slowly breaking her back on an uneven
bed of mud — a sort of Fighting Temeraire of jollity towed
long ago to her last berth, there to moulder. But, luckily,
no possible array of emblems of the sureness of joy’s con-
signment to dust comes to much more, in the eyes of untried
youth, than a few extra touches of charm in some likable
landscape. No shadow was thrown on Bron’s and Molly’s
beatitude.

II

The two could leave a good long gap in any of their
private talks and then go on again from where they had
stopped, as if no gap had come. Such a gap occurred now;
and, while their silence went on, the listening stillness of the
delectable place and the witching hour so worked upon Bron

no

ROUGH JUSTICE

that all decent reserve within him gave way. From say-
ing what he had about the jolly variousness of things he
plunged on now to impart to Molly what simply could not
be breathed in the great world of school — how he liked simply
everything — liked it so much that at times he abs’utely
couldn’t keep still and had to jump about, unobserved, and
grin and chuckle and make faces. “Just think,” he said,
“ of all the feels that things give you — the feel of your
tennis-shoes on pavements — taking hold of it, ’spite of its
flatness. And then the hardy, snorty smell of outdoors
before breakfast. And meals — all ’strord’na’ly different,
like people’s faces. And days — Monday, a grim, bony sort
of day, and Tuesday nothing special — ^just a bit of ‘playing
through the green,’ and Wednesday skinny but nice, and
Thursday plain and fat and heavy, and Friday just a little
bit like father, and Saturday marv’ously friendly. And
names of months — the way they excite you, like pictures,
with thinking about some topping sort of weather — the way
a light will be thrown up on the ceiling some morning when
you wake and snow has come in the night — or the sun in
the evening peering in at your window just for a few weeks
in the summer, though it looks north. April! August!
October 1 Delic’ous ! ”

His voice hugged and fondled the words as if they were
soft furry animals. Molly, sitting aft in her blue and red
gym-dress, faded and shrunken with many accidental and
other immersions in the Thames, listened with friendly
eagerness — more, perhaps, than complete understanding.

“Just think of beds \ ” Bron rhapsodised. There was no
stopping now; he was launched; he had to go through with
the queer wordy job of unpacking the crammed portmanteau
be had within him. “ All their ’stror’n’y tweaky cunning
— the hotness there is in the blankets, and then sheets
to make a little quiet coolness, just enough to filter the

BOOK THREK

III

hotness! And then the gorgeous tuck ng-in dodge to make
a warm hole like a tiny yacht’s cabin, with coldness outside
and scrunchy lumps of ice floating do^^ n-stream, biffing into
each other and making a grinding nc 'se! And houses! —
topping dodges houses are, the way tht y let you come a few
inches off from fearful cold winds and rain, so you can hear
them whiffling and smelling about, th other side of a wall,
trying to get you, and you puffickly saf When it’s stormy
at night I often squiggle about in bed vvith joy, it’s so fine to
have a house. Besides, the spiffing notion of bringing a
very outdoory thing, like a fire, riglu indoors and having
crafty contraptions for not letting it burn your things or the
smoke stufflocate you! ” For a moment or two he had to
pause and revel silently in contemplation of this ravishing
vision. “ Tremendrous! ” he added, after his trance of
beatitude. The old dialect had, between them, the force of
a parenthetic note, “ Of course all this is unspeakably private.”

Molly can scarcely have quite understood. What was
Bron, that he should be able, after six years of numbing
education, to tell her what all the big artists are trying, more
or less vainly, to tell the rest of us? Still, she was moved and
made happy: her old Bron needed her still: he still brought,
to show her, his private turmoils of joy. And he was still
the same touching creature as ever; unable to shine in talk
like Victor, or even Colin, and yet not wary, like Claude,
lest he should say things that gave him away, the plodding
old taker of risks and exposer of flanks and courter of wounds
made her ache with desire to arm him against the ridicule
and the snubs that might come: Bron’s defencelessness made
him dreadfully dear. “You were always like that,” she
said. “ You always used to think everything frightfully
good. Simply everything. When you were only just able
to take off your own boots you used to put them neatly
together and sit down in front of them, liking them. You’d

II2

ROUGH JUSTICE

say, ‘ My bootie is standing beside his friend, my other
bootie.’ You got fearfully happy about them.”

“ I remember them,” Bron said. “ They were thundering
good boots.”

Molly laughed, “There you go!” and Bron laughed at
that; they were merry together; they let the punt drift.

“ Hullo! ” said Bron presently. “ Houses shutting their
eyes! ” Through a milky film of gathering mist they could
see a blind fall like an eyelid over a yellow-lit window.

“ Flood, too,” said Molly regretfully: why should time
pass and spells end and charms be severed?

Flood it was. The infantile babble of the tiny weirs
between pool and pool of the Slack had ceased; over each
little sill the water had drawn itself smooth and a weak
current up-stream had set in ; while they had been sitting in
their heaven, with time well abolished, the punt had begun
to drift slowly up river on the young tide ; it had cleared
already the head of the Ait; now it was floating under the
freakish gables and turrets of New Hall, the large and mean
house that Lord Follett had built for the ease of his mind.

Ill

Between the high garden wall of the house and the river
below it there ran, for the next quarter of a mile up-stream,
a narrow public footpath, hoisted well above high-water
mark. The river side of this gravelled ledge was unfenced;
from its edge a little precipice of mud and rank weeds fell
steeply away, in a slimy slope, to the foreshore, some twelve
feet below. For the first few feet of its width the fore-
shore was stony and sloped gently; then it became a level
expanse of deep greenish slime, which gave place to clean
gravel again a few inches above low-water mark,

Gistleham drunkards homing on Saturday nights and
tacking across and across this path had been known to

BOOK THREE

»i3

rebound off the wall, at the end of a landward tack, so hard
that on the subsequent riverward tack they stepped right
over the edge and slithered down 'he little cliff of mud to
the foreshore beneath. In fact a rising tide had actually
extinguished one of these fallen m- n of pleasure. Others
had lain on the foreshore till the cold sting of the rising
water had spurred them to the effi rt of self-rescue. Such
incidents, and their possible fruits, were always present to
the minds of the local watermen. When the river gave up
its dead, a body meant half-a-crow; i for its finder, if found
in the county owning one bank of tne stream; five shillings
if found on the other. So the watermen had to be on the
“ Qui vive.? ” — or the “ Qui est mort.? ” as Victor said — to
spy out any such windfalls and tow them across, if necessary,
from the half-crown to the five-shilling shore before taking
them out of the water.

Less secure but possibly greater profits might be made by
helping the fallen but still living reveller back to the narrow
path of safety. Of late, indeed, this labour of mercy had
been rising from the status of fortuitous treasure-finding to
that of an almost regular industry. Gistleham watermen,
pinched by their usual winter unemployment, had learned to
look out at certain hours on certain days for a chance of
profitable salvage — so curiously does Providence cater for
some of the inconsiderable sparrows whom it loves. Molly
and Auberon suddenly felt the breathless stillness of the
place infringed by a low, earnest voice on the shore near
them: “ It’s ’im! ’Op orf! ” It was the voice of an aged
ferryman whom they knew.

“’Ush!” said another voice anxiously. “’Ark again!
’Ush!”

“ Garni ’E’s stawted on the pawth a’ ready. Cawn’t y’
'ear ’im shoutin’ the odds? An’ you witin’ ’ere! Yer mye
be throwin’ money awye.”

I

II4 ROUGH JUSTICE

This seemed to convince the man who had doubted. A
figure that was vague-edged in the mist ran down the boarded
slope from the ferryman’s shelter hutch under a great tree,
pushed afloat a skiff that had lain beached near the ferry-
boat, jumped into her bows as she took the water, and
sculled hastily away up-river, keeping close to the foreshore
under the auriferous path. The ferryman, tied to his post
by the possible calls of duty, spoke in tones of envy to some
person invisible. “Aye. Thet’s ’is lor’ship. The beauty!
’Ear ’im ’oiler? Bung-full! ”

Beyond doubt now, a high-pitched voice, uplifted in
monologue, was emerging into clearness, somewhere away
in the mist. It was a man’s — 3 , rather modish man’s: the
final g’s were dropped and there were other fashionable
vulgarisms of pronunciation, besides such maulings and
telescopings of words as proclaimed that this spiller of the
treasures of his mind was drunk. The high brick wall on
the inland side of the path threw the voice well out towards
the river, and this liquid sounding-board gave it great
carrying power.

It soon appeared that the theme of this discourse was the
sovereign duty of learning early how to carry your wine.
Instances of failure were being adduced with little reserve:
“ M’poor father “ M’worthlesh son “ Certain cantin’
neighbour ’f mine.” Himself the speaker was acquitting,
on the main count. “ Been mish’rable sinner ’n all that —
mean t’shay never pretended t’be hyp’crite — all that — ^all
right if people only listen to me an’ try t’learn carry’r wine.”

The noise approached; presently a little band of ad-
vancing figures began to define themselves on the path,
about a hundred yards off. The central figure was a tall
silk-hatted man progressing spasmodically; his vigorous
forward lurchings were qualified now and again by backward
swayings and then by rapid lateral yawings or fallings-away;

BOOK THREE

”5

as a boat edges away from side wines, the wayfarer seemed
now and then to sidle away apprehen ively from the heartless
hardness of the brick wall on his left, of which he had
already made some painful trials, a id then again to edge
away from the Gadarene steep of nud to which he thus
approximated on his right An advance guard of a few
ragged Gistleham children preceded him: they walked like
creatures involved in a beatific dr -am, with their heads
turned back lest they should miss the least item of the
diversion in hand, not to mention tl.at always-to-be-hoped-
for climax, the headlong descent of the principal character
to the foreshore. A similar body of children followed, with
the same absorbed enjoyment and expectancy, at the heels of
the giver of this entertainment. A little farther behind, a
famine-stricken tramp dogged the rear of the procession,
discreetly withdrawn but ready to cut in if affairs should
take any turn favourable to his interests. Below, faintly
rippling the smooth, mist-tarnished water mirror with an
occasional touch of his sculls, the waterman in his skiff kept
precisely abreast of the moralist teaching above.

Something about this rude farce, perhaps the queer in-
congruity of the affront that it put on the pale nun-like
quietude of the river, now hushed and musing over its
vespers, held Molly and Auberon motionless and speechless,
each of them for a moment a mere passive pair of amazed
eyes and ears.

The hero of the pageant halted, some fifty yards off, to
take breath; he leaned back against the wall, with his feet
planted a little way from its base, so that he looked like a
flying buttress upholding a cathedral built in some lamentable
style of Gothic grotesque. From this position of relative
repose he resumed his effort to preach unflinchingly the
pure milk of the word: “ ’S what I’ve tol’ people all m’life —
keep your mouthsh shut and carr’ your wine like man. No

ii6 ROUGH JUSTICE

good! No yoosh talkin’! No yoosh ’t all! — Wishdom
cryin’ out in ’shtreets — no man lishenin’ — shimply gen’ration
vipersh. M’yown child — m’yown ewe son — mean t’shay
m’one lamb an’ heir — wouldn’t lishen — shent him up m’yown
b’loved ’varshity — alma mater ’n’ all that — great sheat of
learnin’ — humane lettersh ’n* all that. No yoosh! — never
learned to carry ’sh wine — ’sh why I’m here now tryin’
t’shave risin’ gen’ration — shufferin’ li’l children come unto
me. Good ol’ shayin’ that! Qui’ righ’l ”

The orator ratified this commendation of Holy Writ with
a nod so energetic that his tall hat was shaken off forwards
and rolled across the narrow path, almost to its outer edge.
Desiring to recover his property he pushed off from the wall
with his shoulders so hard that his bqdy not only reached
but passed the vertical line upwards from his feet. So he
toppled forward, took a couple of steps in the same direction
in the instinctive attempt to regain balance, but fell forward
still with the upper part of his body and tumbled headlong
over the unguarded brink and down the little cliff of muddy
clay and greenstuff. At the bottom he rolled down the
gentle upper slope of the foreshore, where it was stony, and
came to rest, face down and motionless, in the tract of deep
and almost level slime below.

Wisdom was justified of her children. The windfall had
fallen.

IV

People who are brought up on the banks of a large river
do not wait and gape when accidents happen; for most river
accidents transact themselves quickly; the patient may be
out of sight, as well as dead, before you have overcome your
honourable British reluctance to make a scene by going to
his relief. So the interrupted homilist had scarcely achieved
the whole of his descent before Auberon and Molly, without
moving and seconding a resolution, or indeed saying a word,

BOOK THREE

117

were closing in on the spot where he lay, driving their punt
with thrusts that made it slap the water loudly at each
downward flop of its lifted bows.

There was no need. Others had started from nearer at
hand. By the time the punt’s b)w scrunched on the
gravelly foreshore, close to the recurr bent figure, the hungry
tramp had slid, sitting, down the nud precipice and was
plunging knee-deep through the ? latter filth below, to
acquire merit and its rewards by lifting the stunned man’s
face out of the soft mud in which he was ignominiously
drowning, though neither his body nor even his ears were
submerged.

But the tramp himself was not first at the goal. The
waterman, hovering alertly on his own element, had already
driven his boat ashore with two strokes that bent his sculls
like fishing-rods, had shipped them and jumped out and was
rushing to head the tramp off from the prey. “ Garn aht
of it,” he snarled, “ ya bleedin’ cadger! I seen yer, ’angin’
rahnd. Aht of it!”

The underfed tramp fell away, frustrated and whining.
“ Downsher wawnt a bit of ’elp wiv ’im.? Give a man a
chawnce.” But the man who had served his seven long
years of apprenticeship to the water knew what was due to
himself. Shall the bread of the children be given to dogs?
“Aht of it!” he growled again, turning, bare-toothed, as
if he would bite. The skinny vagrant limped off ruefully
while the waterman lifted the prone body upright and scraped
part of the thick mask of mud oflF its face with the edge of
one hand.

“ Yer all right, me lord,” he shouted down one of the
creature’s ears. “ Can y’ear me? Yer in good ’ands. Lord
Follett. Can y’ear me? Thet’s right.” For the man
made of mud — such he looked — had begun to splutter mud
from his mouth and sneeze it from his nose.

ii8 ROUGH JUSTICE

During the few seconds occupied by this first stage of
revival a high-pitched titter from a housemaid perched at a
lofty bedroom window of New Hall made itself heard with
curious distinctness. Then the splutter of literal mud began
to be complicated with a splutter of abuse. “ Blast you,
don’t spit in my ear. J’expect me to chat with my mouth
full of sewage? Damn fool!” Perhaps the cold of the
mud on Follett’s forehead had partly sobered him; at any
rate he was able now to lay his tongue to any foul word he
wanted — even to pronounce them nearly right. The water-
man turned to Molly and Auberon, whom he knew. “ ’E’ll
do all right, Miss, now,” he said in a low voice. “ I
shouldn’t wait. ’E’ll start in, somethink orful, arter this.
Not ’arf lenguage! I shouldn’t wait. Miss Gawth.”

The mud-coloured figure caught at the name. “ Garth I ”
he screamed, furiously rubbing his eyes, “ That plottin’
swine! Come to cook up some more lies about me? Want
another rotten son of mine to harbour, do you? Bloody
kidnappin’ swab! ”

A violent sneeze interrupted the “ lenguage.” The
waterman looked troubled. He had his standards and this
was a scandal. “ Garn aht of it, ya mangy scum!” he
shouted to the lingering tramp, to drive him out of hearing,
“ Run orf ’ome, you boys and gells,” he shouted up to the
children on the path, who did not budge. “ I said Mm
Gawth, me lord,” he whispered earnestly in the peer’s ear.
“ The young lidy is ’ere.”

“ Lady! ” shrieked the noble lord. His voice had the
venomous unreserve of a frantically drunken woman when
she tries to belch out, pell-mell, all the store of obscenities
hoarded secretly in sober hours. “ Lady !— cousin — niece —
what does that stinkin’ hypocrite call her? — shady little by-
blow of his own — little bitch he wants my son for, I sh’pose
—smuggles him into the damned house on purpose — old

BOOK thri:e

119

procurer! — wants a blood cock for Ids bastard young hen.
The beauty’s here, is she? ” The be ist was visibly retching
to vomit all the bestial fantasies of spite that had lain heavy
and sour on his mind for years.

Auberon, though not yet sevcnteer?, was large for his age,
uncommonly strong and a good man of his hands. At the
first handful of filth flung in Molly’s ‘ace by the degenerate’s
tongue, the whole of Auberon’s consc ousness fused itself into
one burning hunger to batter and smitsh the foul mouth into
silence; every ounce of strength and will in him seemed to
have rushed tingling into his fists till they felt like steel balls
to be swung in whirling ecstasy at the ends of two cords till
they got home on that frothing mad dog. He was charging
headlong out of the punt, past Molly, to get at his man,
when she put her good strong hand on his wrist and said
“No! ” He had to look in her face, which he had never
seen pale in his life: now it was frightfully white, but not
faint or weak, and he felt his red passion of uncontrol to be
subdued by her cold contained strength. She turned him
back to his place, and a thrust of her own pole sent the punt
skimming away from the bank,

A swiftly thickening curtain of mist was drawn at once
between the punt and the tableau on shore. At thirty yards
distance the whole scene on land was deleted. Even the
intermittent jet of scurrilities that the nobleman managed to
squirt, as the waterman carried him home, soon subsided
into silence. In mid-river the mist walled Bron and Molly
into a little white cabin that moved as they moved; mid-
river might as well have been mid- Atlantic for all they
could see or hear beyond this milky chamber’s soft walls.

CHAPTER IX

1

A UBERON was sick and numb, shrunken into him-
self with the abject collapse that follows a loss of
L self-mastery. But, river navigation in fog was an
old game of theirs and he made the needful movements by
rote, absently and ruefully: he took out of a pocket a com-
pass and a six-inch Ordnance map, and “ set ” the map on
the floor, amidships, where both could see it. So they
punted homeward, by the chart, each conforming silently to
the movements of the other.

The young tide was gathering strength; it resisted; it
made their work hard — made them animate the swing-
ing rhythm of the punt’s forward plunge at each simul-
taneous thrust of the poles, and then of its eager short run
between the strokes. That did Auberon good. Hard
work was calming; it re-established you somehow; it was
like seeing all the stars quiet and strong on awaking from
some ugly dream. But, next thing, he remembered: “ I’m
a pretty egoistic beast,” he thought. It was Molly, not
he, that the rabid brute had bespattered. He glanced at
Molly’s face, and the white, remote look of it scared
his eyes off her. She must be dead tired, for one thing, he
thought. “ Easy wanted, for me,” he said, and he made
as if to sit down. Weren’t there things they must say?
They couldn’t just go on for ever, as if no smash had
happened.

“ No! ” she said, as if she had dreaded the coming of words.
“ Let’s get on quickly.” She did not look at him nor cease
work for a second.

He acquiesced, and then he wondered. Was it only Follett
that had put her off? Or had he, Bron, also done some-
thing rotten, without knowing, in that fit of fury? He

120

BOOK THRFE 121

easied again for a moment and said, somewhat pleadingly,
“ Friends? ”

“ Yes, of course! ” she said quick! /, as if he had spoken
far off the point. He went back to 1 is work.

Advancing twilight was complicating the mist. Over
the wide-valleyed Thames a damp winter evening may
decline almost dismayingly: everyth! i g is tucked in for the
night under a coverlet somewhat t o shroud-like. Only
the snuggest open fires of coal or of ( omradeship will satisfy
sociable souls at such hours, and now Bron’s shivered within
him. Something frightful had happened: Molly was not
simply battered and bruised: she was somewhere away, out
in the dark, in the wilds, wrestling alone with angels or
devils and not meaning to tell Bron how she got on.

The mist was white no longer, but only a kind of turbidity
added to night’s natural blackness, when Auberon padlocked
the punt in its low-hooded dock. As they crossed the
reeking lawn to the blear-eyed house that blinked feebly out
at them through the blanketing fog, Molly suddenly asked:
“ Did you know, all the time? ”

“ Know what? ” he asked eagerly.

“ Oh, don’t! ” she protested, as though no one now left
in the world could really have any thought but one. “ Why,
that Mr. Fulford was that person’s son.”

“ Son ! ” He slowly found a place in his mind for the
notion. Why, of course — now that he came to fit in one
thing with another. “ Gum, no! ” he said, in amazement.

She looked at him hard. He could not make out in that
darkness whatever there was in her face: but a queer notion
seized him that she was thinking. “Men! Men! The
beasts! I’ve found them out to-day! ” And possibly add-
ing: “ And Bron is one of them, too.” He thought of all
the filthily-talking fellows he knew at school. No girl, he
knew, could ever be like that: girls were like Molly. And

122 ROUGH JUSTICE

if any girl should hear any one of those scrubs, mightn’t she
very well think that such talk was the regular thing among
the men at a school, and wash her hands of the swine, one
and all.

There was nothing to say.

II

In the hall a maid came to meet them; she seemed to be
relieved by their return. Mrs. Nevin and Mr. Victor, she
told Molly, had called five minutes ago and said they would
wait: they were now in the drawing-room.

Molly did an unprecedented thing when she heard this:
she glanced suddenly down at her jolly old clothes that
“ didn’t mind tearing ” — the knicks and short skirt, as though
something had just gone wrong with them; then she said to
Bron, with a rather scared look at the closed door of the
drawing-room, “ Will you? — please! ” and rushed upstairs —
to change, he supposed.

In his own muddy array he went straight, as he was
bidden, to keep the great guests in play until Molly should
reinforce him. No great hand at fighting these delaying
battles, even at the best of times, he was less of a match
than ever to-day, under his new load of care, for the bright
ironic chalf of Victor. That brilliant had just been reset
and repolished to great effect by his first term in the quick
and nimble social air of the university of Oxford. He was
gaily apologetic to Bron; he confessed he had known it was
brutal of people to call on Molly — she and Bron always had
to be hauled down out of the top of a forest tree if anv one
called, or else torn up by their roots out of the river, like two
water-lilies, to wither indoors.

Presently Molly came in, and every one looked at her
with a kind of wonder — even Bron, who would no more
have thought of examining her face, until to-night, than of

BOOK THREE

123

conning his own in a looking-glass. All her perfect right-
ness in his sight, during his whole li'e, had had nothing to
do with her looks. But, now that th s enigmatic, estranging
film was forming itself between them he looked at her hard
and anxiously, as though at some impc "illed possession. And
so he saw, for the first time, that she was a very beautiful
person.

Had she always been so? Or had she only grown into it
lately? Had this very day put the 1 ist perfecting touch of
some mysterious brush to a masterpiece? Through the
lamplit air, now a-buzz with Mrv. Kevin’s murmurous
bumble-bee-like talk, he looked and wondered.

He made no mistake. In Molly’s twentieth year one or
two women were able to find fault with some feature of
hers, or even with that columnar sum of all power and grace,
her tall figure. Too large in the mouth, they would say;
too square in the shoulders; a touch of gauntness. And
then the full red of the cheeks, “ careless and brave,” like
the rose in the song, after hard games in the sun; and the
swing of her arm in making a stroke — was not this Diana
too wholly the puissant young huntress, too Amazonian in
her rude health and Hebean bloom? But no man harboured
these puny heresies — at any rate when Molly was in sight.
Y our critical sense was knocked out of action as she trod the
ground anywhere near you: she made the June turf pr the
ice on a lake look more springy; she moved the strong
shafts of her limbs with a noble unconscious freedom that
set you thinking this must surely be the true gait of woman,
lost perhaps when Eve took to mincing, and now brought
back to the world. She would look at you with a straight
steadiness uncommon in women as old as she was and no
older, and speak with the frank seriousness of children whom
nobody has yet made ashamed of being wise. It was then,
too, that you saw best the extraordinary kindness which

124 ROUGH JUSTICE

shone in her wide brown eyes and softened the rashly criticised
mouth. The whole make of her face was queenly when in
repose; you might admire its structure coldly; but, once the
lamp was lit, you had to love it, for through its clear panes
shone such generous flames as will warm and illuminate
worlds. “ And so,” men would think to themselves when
they met her, “ the youth of woman can be a thing as
glorious as that.”

Ill

You know how it feels to wake monstrously late and find
the sun absurdly high already and the shadows throwing
themselves about in strange places, confounding you for the
sluggard you are. Auberon rubbed the waking eyes of his
mind: where could his wits have been, all the time that the
playmate of his humble self was turning into a world’s
wonder? Unconcealable admiration shone in Mrs. Kevin’s
half-worldly and half-motherly face whenever she looked at
Molly. Even Victor’s voice had traces of awe in it while
he chaffed Molly about her odd choice of a university.
Several explanations, he said, had been offered, from time
to time, of the continued existence of Cambridge. Now
it would have a clear raison (THre at last — for four years,
would it be?

“Three, for me! After that you can do what you like
with .the place.” Molly spoke in a way unexampled in her
— with hard, bright fluency, like the old hands at this social
game: their fencing chatter, meaning nothing at all, had
often made her and Bron ill at ease. Why on earth was she
putting it on? Could she be secretly afraid of something or
other and trying to rush up a screen, as it were, between her
and it? Or was it anger of some sort, and she keeping it
in? Auberon had never seen the ruffled beauty of an
aflFronted young lioness, yet he began to imagine what it
might be.

BOOK THREE

125

I hear that you’re a sovereign prince of football-players,”
Mrs. Nevin said to him absently, w th her eyes on Molly
and Victor.

He answered, “ Not a bit of it,” absently too. For some
minutes the boy and the social veter n talked in that way,
with their eyes and minds not on es :h other’s, and then a
distant door was heard opening and t\^ o new voices, Thomas
Garth’s and old Wynnant’s, became a edible in the firelit hall
of the house, through the long drawi ng-room’s farther door.

They seemed to be talking about t:ie conflict then arising
between the House of Lords and the most Liberal of all
Houses of Commons. “ If it comes to a Test Match,” said
Wynnant, “ we’ll lose. Too long a tail to our team.”

“ It’s shortened by one joint, I have just heard,” Garth
replied.

“ Oh, ho! ” said the peer. “ Have old Pallamore’s sins
found him out.^^ ”

“ No. It’s Follett, my neighbour.”

“ At last? ” said Wynnant cheerfully. “ Oft fell he into
the fire, they say, and oft into the water.”

“ Into the mud to-day, my groom tells me — and then
died in a fit half an hour ago.”

“ Good God! ” Auberon inwardly said. He was young
enough to be awed by this abrupt end put to one at whose
throat he had been flying an hour ago. And Molly, too,
was young. And she had heard; he had seen her head turn
towards the door. But not a sign did she show. It was as
if the dead man were a name and no more. How on earth
had the frankest person whom he knew picked up in one hour
this way of not letting on what she was thinking?

IV

Ever since they had gone to school, Molly had always
come, in “ the hols,” to bid him good-night when he was in

126 ROUGH JUSTICE

bed, and she on the way to her room. To-night he took it
for granted, he could not tell why, that she would not come.
But she did. She looked in at the door, as if just to say the
two words and begone. Perhaps his face was too rueful to
let her do that, and she came in with a sort of reluctance, as
though any business she had had with this sort of thing were
over now. He drew his knees out of the way, for her to sit
on the edge of his bed in the old way. When she did it he
talked as fast as he could about a lot of old hobbies and secrets
of theirs, trying to keep her still there and to talk them both
back by main force to where they were in the summer
holidays. Surely, surely everything could just go on as it
had always done.

“ What’s the very oldest thing,” . he asked, when his own
store of topics ran out, “ that you can remember? ”

“ Mine ? ” she answered. “ How should I know? One
of the oldest is of you saying, ‘ It’s got in my mind that all
the people in the world are just like one big family. Because
each person knows somebody and that somebody knows
some one else. So everybody is known,’ and then you began
to be worried about trees not being in the family, though all
the animals were. You were quite anxious once, when you
woke up in the dark: you said, ‘The branches won’t be
lonely, will they? If they call out in the night, there’ll
always be one of the gardeners, won’t there? ’ ”

“ Was that before Vick came? ”

“ Ages and ages. Don’t you remember? He came the
day I was eight. He had a green tie, tied in a bow, and a
little grey edge of fur to his coat. What absurd things one
remembers.”

Absurd? No. Not in Bron’s sight. As if anybody
could ever forget his first minutes with the King or with
Victor! And yet he could not just laugh and tell Molly
this. The wire was not cut between them, but some non-

BOOK THRFE

127

conductor or other had made its way n; the genial currents
were dulled; some kinds of signah would not pass any
longer.

At some moments he fancied thar Molly had the same
feeling — that she was as helpless as he to hold together what-
ever it was that was breaking. Wh le she sat there on the
bed, there came at times that extra )rdinary kindness into
her eyes; they shed an almost phys :al warmth over him;
they seemed to beg him to take it fn m her that there were
things which would not bear telling, even between him and
her. But all the rest of the time he felt her to be receding,
as though some harsh call had come to her and she must go
away somewhere to be alone and frame her answer.

He did not yet see clearly that he, too, was changing in
presence of the changing Molly with the sudden guard on
her lips, and the new un fixity of the red and white in her
cheeks, and the disquieting disquiet of her eyes, and all the
agitated magnificence that her face and her body seemed to
have put on since sunset. But everything was unsettled;
unfamiliar forces abroad; vague weather-warnings of the
approach of novel, tempestuous impulses thrilled him and
made him self-watchful. Part of him wanted Molly to go
away now; part of him ached to have her stay on and on,
as if the world would end when she went. Halting between
the two promptings he asked, with his first return, since the
smash, to the old dialect of their comradeship, “ Sure that
you haven’t a tempiture? ”

Molly jumped up and scouted the notion.

“ Because,” he pursued, “ you look a little like what you
did with your tempitures in the measles.”

“ Oh, rubbish ! ” she said. “ Are you afraid of catching
something? ”

Of course he wasn’t. And yet somehow it did not say
itself.

128 ROUGH JUSTICE

“ Oh, good-night then,” she said, from the door.

She had not kissed him good-night. In some curious
way, he was glad of it. “Goo’night!” he said, “las*
glowing goo’night! ”

V

On that as on every other day of return from school
Auberon had noticed a somewhat hungry look on his father’s
face. He had seemed to look to Auberon for something
that he wanted. What could it be? Auberon wondered.
Perhaps for Auberon to resemble some model of what a
fellow ought to be. But what sort of model? Well, his
father had sent him to Chellingham; must he not want his
son to be very much the Chellingham man, the regular type?

Auberon wanted to come up to expectation. So he
schooled himself onre more to talk and look like the accepted
leaders of his school world. He packed away out of sight
any freakish ways or individual notions he had of his own.
In the tilt of his hat and the lie of his hair he did his level
best to conform: he dropped the use of a dozen words that
he rather liked, and used the one word “ priceless ” instead
of them all — ^just during “ the hols where he might have
called somebody a little cross, or a bit of a bore or a chatter-
box, if he had not taken care, Auberon held himself in and
called all those persons “ the limit.” He took pains to hide
from his father a great wish that he had to talk to him
about a lot of things other than games.

After a few days of this sturdy self-discipline, Auberon
fancied his father was looking less hungry. So Auberon
trusted that he had done the ’cute thing} and the next hols,
and the next, and so on till the last, he did it again till in his
nineteenth year he was in outward seeming, a pattern of
self-surrender to that mystic power, the “ public-school
spirit.”

The mystic power laid down a few things that he was to

BOOK THREE

129

do, a great many that he mustn’t, a id also a fair number
about which he need not bother. It banned thieving and
cheating at games; but canny lies pla/ed off on pastors and
masters, to get out of a mess, were Jiot tabooed; nor was
the talking of filth. The power mocked at snobbishness
when it was comically gross, but it paid frank respect to
discreet hunters of tufts as practical people who faced the
facts of the world. It approved ot generosity in some
selected cases, but sneered at the notior . of letting off a beaten
fox that had got to earth, or of doin:^ the chivalrous thing
by a foreign country less strong thin ours. Courage it
honoured worthily, unless it was s/iown by some other
nation in the field to our hurt, or by English workmen in
ways that caused their betters to lose money or suffer anxiety,
or by a few public-school men in ways which made the rest
uncomfortable. Auberon never ceased to be puzzled by
the way the power gave the great name of this master virtue
to his own pet luxury of total absorption in ecstasies of
bodily exertion. As if people played Rugger to kill! Or
as if a good boat-race were torture, and all the crews martyrs I
That was very funny. Whether a man ought to stick to
his work or to cut it, the mystic power did not seem to feel
sure. Preachers in chapel would thrill Auberon’s soul with
clarion calls to play the man and get ready in time to tackle
the hard jobs that men had to do. And next day Mr.
Chaytor-Tonge would be calling all the foundation scholars
“prize pigs,” as before, or some much-beribboned General
would come down and boast that he had never been far
from bottom in form.

“ Take it from me ” — so the diverse oracles seemed to
say, and Auberon “ took it ” as well as he could from them
all, and the result was a fine moral confusion. Some obscure
instinct, as peremptory as that which drives cats to go out
and dig field-latrines for themselves, even on a wet day,

ic

130 ROUGH JUSTICE

kept him away from lies and obscenity. But a kind of
loyalty in him made him feel that perhaps this cranky
abstention of his was not quite the fair thing to do by his
fellows. To make amends he conformed to custom all the
more closely at points where no fad of his own disabled him
for doing so. He went to the expense and bother of smoking
until at last he came quite to like it. He tried to remember
to drag a few bloodies into his talk, though this ritual seemed
rather silly. And, anyhow, he could idle, term after term.
To do it, he had to go without food for a certain hungry
inquisitiveness that still lingered on in his mind. But one
must try to do what is right.

Two or three times, before he left school at eighteen, he
awoke with a sudden sureness upon him that he was just a
shirker, sneaking along from one funked battle to another,
or letting a whole river of splendid opportunities flow past
him unused. But these misgivings paled away with the
night: their last trace was gone when next a close race or
hard game brought its heaven of happy effort and simple
aim and its blessed release from diflidence and doubt and
mis-adjustment to things around him. What could be
wrong with what felt so much like a benediction?

Besides, he was visited, off and on, by his old private
rapture — the loveliness of it, that things should be just what
they were; jolly or not, pretty or not, still they were:
that made them exciting — even rain and lost games and the
broken leg that he once got at footer. So this was what
breaking your leg was: why it was like a new and rare egg
to add to your collection: it was tremendous.

BOOK FOUR

CHAPTER X

I

W HEN Thomas Garth matriculated at Oxford, a
miracle had lately been doi e in the place. One
Stowell, a man of genius, aad managed to turn
that beauteous college, St. Mary’s, iri o a seat of education.
However he brought it about, most »f the men who went
up in those days to St. Mary’s lost n( time in ceasing to be
hobbledehoys. Somehow their wits were given a chance to
ignite 5 the dull dogs did not rule, and a freshman soon
found he would not count for much there unless he could
hold his own in something more than fifth-form chaff.

Lively minds will make their way to wherever the full
stir of life is. In Garth’s time the college was not only
making the most of its men, but getting the men of whom
most could be made. So old “ Skimmery ” men were now
to be found wherever any kind of work worth doing was
being done well: they stirred the dust of the world; they
made a dint on their time. Garth, craving the fairest chance
for his son, sent him up to St. Mary’s.

But a college may change pretty fast. Stowell had died,
and a junior don who had looked, to the saintly elder dons,
like a budding Stowell reigned in his stead. His name was
Cyril Ducat. Once elected Warden by these innocents.
Ducat had bidden a long farewell to the scholar’s austere
life. He had married at once a plain young woman with
a wisp of pedigree and a passion, which he shared, for
“ knowing everybody who was worth knowing.” To
ensure his beloved and himself against any shortage of this
life-giving contact with “ the best people,” Ducat chose
among the throng of would-be entrants to the college with
an unflinching resolve to do no injustice either to blood

131

132 ROUGH JUSTICE

without wealth or to wealth without blood. Unknown to
Garth, who had lived, of late, so much out of the world,
the University wits cut their jokes; they circulated funny
copies of verses alleged to be Ducat’s latest “ Lines to the
Premier Viscount of Rhodesia,” and so on. Ducat held
on his course, unperturbed. The spirited life of the great
college was steadily scoured away; the lead went some-
where else.

“ We’re the funniest gang, at Skimmery,” Colin, already
a second-year man, explained to Auberon. “ Ducat’s a
collector, and his lines are princes, counts, Gorgius Midases
and really illustrious sportsmen like your good self. He
also values the Scholars, just to get contrast — a few pictur-
esque paupers, you know — Dominie Sampsons — funny
gargoyles — they’re thrown in to give a grotesque little tang
to this quaint Gothic pile.”

“Hullo!” said Auberon. “Where do you come
in? ”

“ Absolute tail of the team. I’m the Last of the Barons,
or their offspring. ‘ Brutus is an Honourable man.’ Simple
as you see me here, even I am a tuft — a tiny, flash, off-
colour tuft, but I serve. I fill up a chink in Ducat’s tall
edifice.”

“ What about Victor? ” Auberon asked.

“ Oh, Victor’s hors concours, Victor’s sui generis, Victor
is the paragon, the facile conqueror, the cynosure of neigh-
bouring eyes, the Admirablest of local Crichtons, the Beau
Nash of this seedy Bath. He can win University prizes
without losing caste. When a few eager bloods think of
founding a new wine-club they suddenly pause and say,
‘ Hadn’t we better consult Nevin first? ’ If it weren’t for
fear of Victor’s turning up that piece of consummate model-
ling, his nose, this bounding college would bound to heights
beyond belief. Next year, when Victor goes down, it will

BOOK FOUR

133

probably have to put up the shutters. What on earth made
you come to it? ”

“ Oh! the Guv was a Skimmery n.an.”

“ Yes, yes, of course — in the Stone Age.”

It was the second afternoon of Al )eron’s freshman term
and the two were walking up the famous High — Auberon
deep in a trance of grave contentment. Everything else
was forgotten. The lovely place, tl.e lovely autumn day,
the lovely Virgin Porch of the ’Var>ijty Church, with the
last leaves of creepers lustrously dying about its fanciful
twists and flutings of stone; the sun’s pensive radiance
blessing it all — these things ravished his soul above earth; it
was enough to have known them, whatever might come.

He had called on Wetherby, his tutor — a disenchanted
survivor from Sto well’s band of enthusiasts for the kindling
of valiant fires in the youthful mind. Wetherby had eyed
him with an air of kindliness without hope. “ I suppose,”
he had said, “ your idea is to diversify games with a little
rudimentary study? ”

“ That’s about it, I suppose. Sir,” Auberon had assented,
rather blankly. Before he knocked on Wetherby’s door he
had screwed himself up to avow a certain wild hope which
he had been furtively framing ever since he had known that
he was to go up to Oxford. His father had once said in
Auberon’s hearing that “ freedom to learn and freedom to
teach ” were the mark of a true university. Well, of course,
Oxford was that. So lots of fellows there must be happily
pegging away, finding out about things that they liked and
wanted to know — and actually having these delights counted
to them for “ work.” What if he should be free in this
place to pry all day into the very things that had always
secretly tickled his curiosity, till he could get to know every

134 ROUGH JUSTICE

Jack atom there was to be known about that thrilling old
sportsman, Caesar, his marches and fights, contrivings and
engineerings, or else about rivers and all their curious
habits and ways — why they should scour in one place and
silt in another, and wriggle and twist when they crossed
level ground, and have amusing little squabbles with each
other at their sources, one of them poaching water away
from another.

But irony always struck Auberon numb. It made him
feel that nothing he could say would be of use. So he only
said, “ That’s about it, I suppose. Sir,” and Wetherby sighed
gently and made out the usual list of Mods lectures for
Auberon to attend. No doubt the disillusioned veteran
wrote the big, dumb, civil freshman off as the usual public-
school product — ust another blob of athletocratic clay to silt
up poor Oxford’s dulled stream.

An hour after this reverse a magnate no less than the
President of the ’Varsity Boat Club had called on Auberon
and painted solemnly the brilliancy of the career that might
be Auberon’s if he stuck faithfully to rowing. And then
the captain of the ’Varsity Rugger fifteen had called, solemn
and moral as the oarsman, and had adjured the heavy-weight
fresher to fritter no time away on trivial things but to leave
all else and be ready, if needed, to serve his university in
the field.

Here was earnestness; these were no frigid Wetherbies.
To each of these two luminaries Auberon had promised
humbly to do what he could. But he was free, just for
to-day, to walk Oxford with Colin, who led a life of sociable
ease, rowed in no galley and toiled in no scrum.

Out of the High they turned sharply in at the bottle-
necked end of the Turl. Auberon almost gasped at the
sight of that most Oxford-like of Oxford’s streets. Fair
beyond all desire or dream was the little walled space lifted

BOOK FOUR

*35

intact out of some other age that mus* surely have possessed
its soul more quietly than we do our . A spirit of grave,
courteous tranquillity shed itself into the air between the
street’s containing masses of weath jred masonry: from
gardens out of sight a few embrowned boughs hung swaying
over high walls. Along this graci( us corridor curiously
carved out of stone the hollow ech ing of their leisurely
feet seemed to mingle with resonance lingering on in niche
and coign and gateway from times of which Auberon knew
almost nothing and yet imagined grear wonders.

But Colin was talking. “ And t ulford — the prince in
disguise — the Bright Apollo — or was it Hercules? — is he
still cricket pro in the house of Admetus? ”

“Yes,” said Auberon, though he could scarcely attend.
They were just debouching out of the Turl into the Broad,
an elongated oval pond of public quiet, sequestered from the
rackety currents of Magdalen Street and the Corn — so
Auberon saw it, being helplessly void of the gift of finding
nothing wonderful enough to take his breath away.

“ Still to be seen in the hols? ” Colin was saying.

“ Fulford? He came to tennis once or twice this Vac.”
They were just stepping out from one of the leafy-roofed
aisles of the great street of St. Giles into its broad roofless
nave. A forested street, a cathedral-like street. Walking
in these glades of St. Giles Auberon heard Colin’s voice as
you hear rain that falls out of doors while you read some
great tale by the fire.

Colin was saying, “Well, it’s Victor’s affair. I’m out
of it.”

“ Out of what?”

“ Ever see that humorous picture at Florence — or is it
Milan? — the Virgin’s suitors breaking their canes in a pet
when the Holy Ghost won the lady?— -or was it the hon
bourgeois Joseph? ”

ROUGH JUSTICE

136

“ No.”

“ It’s there. And I broke my cane first.”

‘‘ Blowed if I follow,” Auberon said.

“ Cast your capacious mind back. To certain Easter hols
— the Chantry lawn — ^and stump cricket? ”

Oh yes, Auberon could remember that. Molly, Claude
and Fulford had beaten Auberon, Victor and Colin.

“ And Victor missing a sitter from Claude, because he
was looking at Molly? ”

“ No.”

“ And Claude sending Fulford to look for Claude’s
sweater while Claude poured into Molly’s ear the scores he
had made at Harrow? ”

“ Not a bit.”

‘‘And Fulford, very much the honourable pro, looking
away from Molly so hard that you could tell in a jiff he
was seeing nobody else? ”

“ Oh! Rot! ” said Auberon.

“What? No observation? Possibly you don’t remember
even little Colin, the simple, the homely, none of your
outshining Victors or famished heartrending Fulfords or
firmly acquisitive Claudes? Simply a super, a poor ‘also
ran ’ ! ‘ Among the rest young Edwin bowed,’ ”

“What Tommy rot!” Auberon said, with a certain lack
of variety. His gorge rose at any talk about Molly as some
guerdon desired by men. Of course she was that. Every-
body from Cambridge seemed to speak, with bated breath
almost, of her looks and the admiration they won, and her own
coldness. But any man’s talk about her as a woman, some
day to be mated, hurt him. Oxford had suddenly lost its first
blitheness of beauty; something beautiful, too, but inducing
an ache, like the baffling poignancy of sunny places left
empty, invested it now. He wished he were playing football,
or else rowing like fury.

BOOK FOUR

137

III

Aubcron found that the life of m« st men at St. Mary’s
was just about as strenuous as lying rull length in the sun,
with soft music playing. Learning w is dross in their sight;
base was the slave who worked or w'zs poor. Ducat had
done his work well.

Not quite without an effort did Auberon conform once
more to his surroundings. Some lit' e part of him was as
incorrigibly aristocratic as a good sol iier becomes when he
is left alone on guard at a dangerous post. That part of
him saw well enough the baseness of bilking a generous
world and giving a rotten bad bargain to country and friends.
It made him wince to think of the figure he cut when
guests of his father tried to treat him like a man and talked
to him about things which grown men cared for: to have
to be always saying “ Afraid I really don’t know,” or “ Sorry
— I don’t know the first thing about it,” was too ignominious.
To be always a mere vulgar maggot, squirming about in the
cheese ! — it was too low for anything.

So, even after his failure with Wetherby, Auberon made
a little bit of a push to gain some education. He sneaked
off to the unfrequented Skimmery library and tried to browse
on such works of politics and history as seemed likely, from
an inspection of their outsides, to be the right things. Most
of these cut up pretty tough. He also dipped into such poets
as he had heard named most often at his father’s table. Most
of their major works affected him only as gigantic freaks of
artificial statement. But now and then he struck on a find,
like primitive man when he hits, by a happy fluke, upon
some intoxicant juice; thus would Auberon pounce upon
some morsel of verse :

Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping
Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star.

138

Or

ROUGH JUSTICE

The solemn light behind the bam,

The rising moon, the cricket’s call.

The August night and you and I —

What is the meaning of it all?

Or a verse at the end of a play:

And all their passionate hearts are dust,

And dust the great idea that burned
In various flames of love and lust
Till the world’s brain was turned.

To put these delicious drugs to the supreme test Auberon
took heart to submit a sample or two to the judgement of
Victor himself. Victor looked out alertly for each author’s
name. Each was hopelessly modern and unconsecrated.
Then he cast a compassionate glance over the lines them-
selves. “ Quite nice, you know,” he clemently said of one
of the things that had stirred his young Philistine friend; and
of another, “Well, it looks quite like the real thing, if you
hold it far enough off and of a third, “ A little derivative
— eh? No Matthew Arnold, no Mr. Le Smith — Mr. Le
Smith, did you say? ”

It almost awed Auberon out of the lawless joy he had got
from the stuff. He told Colin, and Colin explained, “ You
see, Victor has been at the centre of every Jack thing that
ever was done — in at the birth of the Agamemnon and
Hamlet — used to sit in Raphael’s studio and make talk
to the woman who sat for the Sistine Madonna — did the
right thing at the club with Reynolds and Garrick and
Burke— did it all in some previous life, and now he’s dumped
down here among us duds and yet he’s nice to us.”

Yes, Victor was nice. He bore, like a saint, with the
ungainly struggles of puny moderns to paint or write or
think, now that Velasquez and Shelley and Plato were dead.
No one could have moved through a deflated world with

BOOK FOUR

139

more forbearance. His rightful lassitude never led him to
hiss aloud the poor actors now shufflii g about on the stage;
he only registered, with the minim tm of asperity, their
insufficiency in Jove’s sight. Three years of unclouded
success at the university had mellowed him to a state more
benignly regal than ever; he did not exact deference now;
he took its due payment for grantee', as kings come into
boxes at the play and sit down with ut looking behind to
see that their chairs have been pu^ led into place. His
suavely moulded beauty seemed aluays to be gaining a
more finely curvilinear grace. Aubcion felt that his hero’s
wisdom and wit were never serious!/ taxed by any occa-
sion that turned up: it seemed as if the little crystals of apt
speech that came from his lips must be only a few stray flakes
blown away from spacious snowfields brimming with similar
brilliants.

To these charms Victor’s fourth year at Oxford was now
adding the last grace of an exquisite light melancholy.
Laurels, laurels, always more laurels — Victor had come to
accept these tributes with a face half-humorously wry, as
if they were pieces of well-meant impertinence offered in
too loud a voice by a second-rate world. Nothing could
excite him now, in our small, vulgar day; the nobly exciting
things had died out; the only experiences now to be had
could be ticked off as sorry engravings printed too late from
a worn plate that might have had some merit once.

This air of distinguished tragedy impressed Auberon
deeply. Old Vick had been through it, and no mistake.
Old Vick must know. So Auberon did his level best to
avoid being carried away by his beloved orts and gobbets
of verse, as Victor playfully called them; Auberon tried
to find them dull; not quite successfully; still he did what
he could. And Colin helped; Colin would come bouncing
into Auberon’s rooms on boisterous mornings of jocund

40

ROUGH JUSTICE

wind and tell him he must cut everything else and hire a
horse and come a-hunting with Colin and the South Oxford-
shire hounds across windy Ott Moor.

The lectures that had to be cut, to give time for the chase,
led to an interview for them both with the Warden, whose
manner, to Auberon’s surprise, grew almost benedictive as
soon as Colin explained the cause of their defection. From
that moment the Warden’s main anxiety seemed to be lest
he should seem intolerant of “ the natural habits of a gentle-
man.”

At that point in the interview Auberon made a sad
blunder. “ My dear George Washington,” Colin said to
him afterwards, “ what possessed you to say hunting wasn’t
really a habit of yours? ”

Auberon simply couldn’t tell. He didn’t know.

“ The old bounder’s face fell like a drop-curtain,” said
Colin, “ He had begun to think you a bit of a blood —
venery i’ the morn; roulette of an evening; W ein^ W eib und
Gesang; the bong tong all round.”

Auberon marvelled.

IV

His wonder was not diminished the first time he dined
at the Warden’s lodgings, near the end of Auberon’s first
summer term.

Now and again the Oxford Union Society, kindly nurse
of many statesmen, flavours one of its weekly debates by
inviting a famous old member or two back for a night, to
break a lance once more in the lists where they learnt to
ride the ring in their youth. For that night the choice had
fallen on Thomas Garth and his old friend and adversary,
Clement Wade, the Salisbury and Gladstone of Oxford in
the far-oflr ’seventies.

Garth was to stay the night with the Ducats and Auberon
was bidden to dinner before the night’s tournament.

BOOK FOUF

141

“ Your father,” the Warden had said, in inviting Auberon,
“ forms a very dear tie between you and me.” And yet
there was a touch of plaintiveness, n )t quite reproach, in
the Warden’s manner towards the olii friend who had not
come off in the world so much as he might. Some instinct
of protest seemed to urge Ducat to ca 1 to the minds of the
guests at his table the many Skimmer , men who, since the
thirteenth century, had been anything but prodigal sons of
St. Mary’s — its Statesman-Cardinal, Pelham, the man who
got the better of kings and squared a match with a pope;
its most famous Lord Chancellor, Yorke — almost alone
among seventeenth-century bigwigs Yorke had somehow
kept his big wig utterly untumbled by the revolutions of
that age; its Georgian Primate, Hickling, whose firmness,
if better backed up, might have killed in the egg the young
serpent of Wesleyan ism. All of them seemed to have had
a great life of it, well out in the sun, or, as the Warden put
it, “ reflected credit on the college.”

Through a great north - western window, mullioned
and bayed, its stained glass storied with the coats-of-arms
acquired by some of the saints in this calendar of the
Warden’s, the evening sunlight fell sideways on the face
of Thomas Garth, silhouetting his grave profile while he
listened. He had not seen Ducat since they both took their
degrees.

The Warden’s note presently changed, even before he
changed his subject. His tone grew definitely sad.

“ It’s coming,” Colin softly breathed to Auberon, whom
he sat next — for the Warden knew all the blood-relationships
of the respectable world, and had invited Colin to meet his
older kinsman. Some familiar performance, it seemed, was
about to begin.

It was. Two years before, the Warden’s prayers had
been crowned by the matriculation of a minor, but still an

142 ROUGH JUSTICE

authentic, prince at St Mary’s. The poor lad, a common-
place weakling, had died in his first term, and Ducat’s sorrow
at this foreclosure of many brilliant hopes had engendered
in his mind a sort of memorial vision of this lost link with
Courts as an embodiment of all human virtues and graces.
The Warden’s eyes seemed almost to glaze, as though im-
movably fixed on some remote and vanishing perfection,
while he worked his way now into a reference to the illus-
trious dead. “ Tw Marcellus eris^^ he tragically quoted; he
slightly threw up his fine hands in Christian resignation
before the untimely ravages of fate.

“ Sed ad laetiora njertamur^^ he murmured at last, with
an air of self-mastery painfully regained, and he passed
manfully on to talk of the eight’s fine performance that very
afternoon. Auberon had been rowing, and Ducat touched
gracefully on the circumstance. “ You have done well,”
he said gravely. “You have reflected credit on your
college.”

“ It’s all our number seven. Sir,” Auberon eagerly said.
“ Brown carries all of us along.” Ducat had let loose the
waters of one of Auberon’s little enthusiasms of admiration.
This man Brown was really a topper — the tiny instant of
leisure that he preserved in his forward swing, no matter
how rapid the stroke, and the butterfly touch of the sensitive
hands feeling out to almost incredible lengths over the
stretcher before nipping in — ^and the way he took up the
poor snatchy stroke set by the failing man in front of him,
steadied it, lengthened it, gave it life and power and rhythm
and passed it on, thus transfigured, to animate the six toilers
amidships and up in the bows! “ Tremendous! ” Auberon
ejaculated, finding no words to describe these perfections
more precisely.

The Warden turned smilingly to a silent roseate youth
with shiny damp hair matted down backward from the

BOOK FOUB

H3

brow. “ Brown? ” he said suavely. A wet- bob at Eton
with you, Mr. Foljam? ”

“No, no!” said Foljam. Brown he explained, with
quite perceptible distaste, came from ‘some local school”
somewhere up in the north — Bradforc Foljam thought the
place was called, but he spoke as if it might pollute him to
know exactly.

The Warden instantly lost interest in the whole matter.
Colin breathed, soft and low, to Aube on, “It was Ducat’s
own school.” Colin’s look was quite discreetly impish.

“ There,” it seemed to say, “ that’s what these great ones
are like. Listen. Enjoy. Get all the fun you can out of
these comedies.”

Auberon’s eyes, however, were meeting his father’s just
then. There might have been warmth in this meeting.
Had Ducat had one word to say which Garth and his son,
those two ready admirers, could have admired, these two
shy spirits might have rushed together, united in this generous
glow. Instead of that, each found every trace of intimate
expression frozen out of the face of the other. Of course
it was only because innate courtesy was on guard, in them
both, against the scrubby offence of sneering at the man
whose salt they were eating. But coldness may strike
coldly down, however honourable its occasion. So their
minds met for a second without touching; the surface of
each slid elusively over the other, as though some lubricant
film intervened.

CHAPTER XI

1

I N the Warden’s hall, after the early -ending meal,
Auberon put as much as he could of the dumb fervour
of his baulked goodwill into the squire-like service of
helping his father on with his coat. He paid almost feliatical
attention to the lie of the collar behind, like a lover after a
ball, when he adjusts the cloak round the shoulders ot the
beloved object still unwon, and perhaps averse — he cannot
l^tell and dare not yet try to find out.

So they walked, together but apart, along the Corn,
now all in a hum with its usual vesper throng of blithe
idlers, to the debating-hall of the Union. Many faces turned
as they came in; a* quick cheer rose and Auberon’s heart
gave a jump. Good! Good! — even those strangers could
tell. Good old world — ^always better, wherever you came
to dig into it, than you had thought.

The theme for debate was an old one; it has to haunt
the patriotic portion of any people which has contrived to
take the lead among nations but feels the breath of strong
rivals hot on the back of its neck as it struggles along.
Was England still what she had been? Or were ours times
of flinching and failure? That was the gist of it,

A manly part of the youth of Oxford shows up well in
these debates. Much of the audience is listless and rather
cruelly expectant; like loafers who hang round the jumps at
a steeple-chase, they are hoping to see some of the riders
slip up and fall off their high horses. By Jove, these fellows
had pluck! — so Auberon felt as he saw the two first speakers
enter stoutly into the perilous loneliness of the man who has
got up on his legs amidst a non-convivial crowd and cannot
escape into sedentary safety again till he has laid out before
these cold people some of the private stuff from the secret

BOOK FOUR

145

drawers of his mind — perhaps to hav<“ it tittered at. How
could Auberon weigh the severakarguments, as he had meant
to? He could feel only a painful crav ing for each speech to
go well; a joke that did not come off niade him feel snubbed;
once, when a speaker’s long pause seemed to threaten a
positive access of aphasia, Auberon sweated like a horse.

II

His father spoke third; jit one m« ment Thomas Garth
was sitting silent, secure, uncommitt ed; the next he was
standing, doomed to find words, to go on, to struggle through^
to some unseen end.

For some seconds Auberon kept his eyes on his own knees;
all of him nestled in the glowing warmth of happiness
kindled by the big audience’s welcoming cheer. Then a
voice began, deliberate, tranquil and strong, but surprising,
as a parade or platform voice commonly is to those who
have known its possessor only in the private life. Auberon
stole a shy look up. Yes, it was his man: the face’s sunken
beauty was nobody else’s. First he delighted in that, and
then, when he could attend to the words, in the speaker’s
austere refusal to score any cheap, easy point that threw
itself in his way. If he ever came near the edge of facile
effectiveness. Garth seemed to sheer off as though from shoal
water. And yet the energy of his seriousness made the
previous speakers seem now as if they could scarcely have
cared. Auberon began to feel that he had never known
before how burningly eager a man may be to persuade, for
love of his country, and also how many things a man of
worth will not let himself say, even to save countries.

In good truth Garth was eager. When a man first sees
his own countryside from the air, he may espy with astonish-
ment some hitherto unnoticed line, coloured, indented, or
raised in relief, cutting like a bar of shadow right across all

L

146 ROUGH JUSTICE

the features of the familiar face. Garth, removed from
politics now and viewing that well-known ground from a
little way off, had caught sight of a discontinuous crack that
struck him as opening itself at a sinister pace across the whole
landscape. Now at one place, now at another, but always
along the same portentous line, the fissure gaped like a
streak of black dashes and dots that threatened to run
together and split everything.

Men, as a body, had always been trying to get farther
and farther away from that base old state of themselves in
which the weight of a man’s club and the stony cunning of
his heart were all that he had to ensure him the right to
live out his own life in the way that he chose. And of
course the kind of men in whom the tiger or gorilla element
is strongest had always kicked against that human movement.
They broke out now and then and had to be routed back to
their jungles. That was all right: that was natural; the
new streak was not that.

It was this. Some crazy impulse to wreck the human
cause seemed now to have seized, of all others, the most
fragile of human creatures, the ones most certain to stand or
fall, in every article of happiness and safety, with the rule
of loyal self-control. Women were trying to force a change
of law, quite just in itself, by practising the brutal tricks of
neurotic male savages. Rich lawyers and traders, men for
whom law and order meant as much as plate glass and
policemen mean for a jeweller, with his paraded diamonds,
were toying with plots for killing their neighbours in Ulster.
Among slight-minded people in London chatter about a
coming “ class war ” was becoming the fashion; some of it
among people soured by poverty of their own, or naturally
prone to envy, or sickened by some passion of pity that had
curdled into spite; more of it among the rich illiterates and
their harems, who canvassed aloud in flash restaurants the

BOOK FOUF

147

chances of roping the Army into a “ p jsh ” to shut up “ the
talk-shop at Westminster ” and scrap ‘ all this representative
rot ” before Labour could get into pc *ver. Thus were the
frailest babes in the nursery beginr ing to bleat for the
extinction of the long-suffering nursr who had kept them
alive. And everything in Thomas Garth, his passionate
conservatism, his instinct of national omradeship, his scorn
for vulgar valuations, for bluster and cant — all of him rose
up in protest against that puny petular ce. To-night he was
showing how intensely he longed now to win youth over to
the side of sane manhood. What did party matter, he
asked; there were splendid men in all parties; the thing was,
whatever your party might be, to help to keep it loyal to the
imperilled common cause of human decency.

Auberon was amazed to find that he understood every
word. It was almost as if his own mind, wondrously
cleared, were speaking aloud: why, he must have been
thinking these thoughts all the time, and not have known
it: now they were marshalled and fixed. He felt shy of
cheering; still, the cheers of other people were loud for a
while; his own took cover under them. But presently
the cover thinned. Once, to his confusion, he found
himself cheering alone. Before the speech ended, applause
from other listeners had almost ceased. Good Lord! people
were not understanding!

Not they. A few virile minds might be stirred, but the
appeal to commonplace youth well soaked in the public-
school spirit was unquestionably failing. Garth was not
paying the regular price of admission to minds reared on
the stock assumptions and phrases of a party and a class: no
jolly claptrap or fine rattling detraction came to warm the
blood of the young amateurs of forced notes and spicy
hyperbole. No doubt they felt they were not getting a
lead; for their palates Garth’s salt had no savour.

148 ROUGH JUSTICE

A fluttering rustle of relief ran through the hall when
Garth ended. Auberon could almost hear the reviving stir
of their hunger for more full-blooded stuff. He felt a sore
tenderness for his father, now sitting beside him; alone,
frustrated, shut up in a pride so clean that it scared little
dirty-souled people away, not regaling himself on self-pity,
not calling on any one else for one touch of a finger of
sympathy — that was how his father lived; he saw it now.
He did not dare to put out a hand and stroke his
father’s. To-night, however, later on, in his own rooms at
St. Mary’s — to-night he would speak; he would have it
all out.

Clement Wade was speaking: he was well launched now;
the big abstract phrases were rolling out grandly and making
their mark, inspiriting the Liberal minority, goading the
Conservative majority to murmurs of dissent. “ A boldly
progressive outlook,” “ a new and vitalising conception of
human personality,” the “ increased consciousness of human
solidarity in the masses,” “ the need to envisage the more
significant phenomena of our times from a broad point of
view ” — drip, drip went the big words, falling on Auberon’s
distracted ears like the pit-a-pat of some leaky tap. Y es, by
God! To-night, in his rooms, he would turn the lamp low
and make friends with his father.

Ill

In walking silently down dimly lighted streets, beside a
person for whose fuller friendship or better opinion you are
hungering, you may find a sharp curiosity growing inside
you. What sort of look is the beloved or feared face wear-
ing now? When next a light falls on it will you see there
an expression that seems to open welcoming arms? Or one
that will hold you off at arm’s length? Auberon led the
way up the unlighted stairs to his rooms, turned on the red-

BOOK FOUR 149

shaded lamp that stood on his table and looked quickly across
at his father.

The light was unequally cast; it was strong below and
weaker above, and his father’s face was not illuminated
evenly. Its almost grim lower half w^s well lit; any tender-
ness that shone in its brown eyes was in the shadow above;
no radiant emphasis fell upon it. "I he general effect was
one of enigmatic remoteness. No do ibt his mood may well
have been one of inward retreat, the m* -od which often follows
lost battles: your world shrinks in ro and you then, and you
shrink in, too, to keep decently away from its touch; round
your frustrated hopes you draw impalpable curtains, as screens
are arranged round the bed of a moribund patient in a
hospital.

Auberon’s spirit quailed. He nervously got busy at his
hospitable duties, offering drinks, tobacco, a churchwarden
pipe — ^anything to put off a little longer the time when they
should each be sitting back in a big chair with nothing
trivial left to be done — only that plunge to be made.

But the awful time came. Silence set in. A weak flame
was leaping a little amidst the low glow of the fire before
them; Auberon watched it; he tried to mesmerise himself,
by staring at it hard, into making his great effort in a kind
of trance. He ran over hurriedly, in his mind, the things
he was going to say; they had filled his head tight at the
Union — admiration and thanks, and regrets for his own
waste of his youth — and how he knew that he never could
come to much now, but that he did see at last that all one’s
time had got to be a fight for the right things, and couldn’t
even a crock like him hope to be given some small coolie
job to do for the cause?

The tiny flame leapt in the grate more and more feebly;
he was watching it still when his father lanced the swollen
silence with a trivial enquiry: was “ Battel call ” still a

150 ROUGH JUSTICE

weekly rite at St. Mary’s? Did men whose week’s battels
— college bills — had run rather high receive them in the
hall, from the Warden’s own hand, instead of the butler’s —
just to let them see that he knew all and that wasters were
scrubs in his sight?

Oh no! Auberon said; Ducat had scrapped all sucli
slights on free spenders. “ I don’t mean. Sir,” Auberon
added, “ that that’s an excuse for myself.” As a fact he had
not been profuse — was not dressy, ran no ticks in the town
and had declined a proffered welcome to Colin’s pet Apo-
laustic Club of gay livers. Still, conscience was ready, just
|hen, to find fault with everything he had done. Besides,
he must make his way, somehow, towards the fearful job he
had on.

“ You’ve not done badly,” his father said, “ in that way.
Better than I. First states of etchings had a terrible lustre
in my day. They went to the head. Hullo! you’re want-
ing to work? ”

Auberon must have made some fidgety movement in his
distress. His father was rising.

“ Don’t go, Sir,” Auberon implored, and the other’s
movement was checked. “ Precious little work I’ve done,
Sir, all this year,” he hurried on — he mustn’t stop now: he
must keep his tongue going. “ I’ve been a wash-out, Sir.

1 ” Oh, Hell! — it was sounding all wrong. “ I,” “ I,”

“ I,” — it seemed as if he were uttering no other word : hh
shirking, his failure, his regret — wasn’t it all just the shabby
old egoist trick of jawing about one’s dear self, only got up
in a humbugging moral disguise, as remorse and the like?
The flow broke off.

“ You’ve three years yet,” his father said. It sounded
cold. Garth had always tried not to do his son and his
ward the wrong of trying to live their lives for them — to
fight their battles, make their choices, rob them of the risks

BOOK FOUR

151

and glories of autonomy. “ And after that ? ” he added

and paused a moment, and then “Of course I’ve no right
to pry,” he added again.

“ Well, Sir,” Auberon awkwardly Naid, “ the dons do talk
of the Church.”

Garth listened, rather blankly, and Auberon felt that for
once he was seeing right into his fat ler’s mind. Was not
his father’s thought this — “So they re shunting him intc
that siding. ‘ Put me into one of t le priests’ offices, that
I may eat a piece of bread.’ ” His father had quoted that
once. Did Auberon know, his faffier asked now, that
Gistleham was a family living.

“ I know,” said Auberon. “ I thought of that.” He
did not say that he had only known since yesterday. Ducat
had told him. Trust that connoisseur of loaves and fishes to
know everything — the income, the size of the parsonage
house, the ripeness of Uncle Quentin for the grave. Nor
did Auberon say that his own thought had been “ Parson
perhaps, but no family living for me! ” But now it
seemed too cheap — to renounce what nobody had offered
to him. So he let his words stand at their wretched face
value.

How should Garth, with his deep respect for every man’s
privacy, know what was behind the face that gazed, as
containedly as his own, into the shallow bed of red embers
where the little flame had now ceased to jump? A silent
minute passed in that guarded gazing, and then the elder
spoke, in the slightly changed tone that announces a new
topic. “ Did I tell you that I have some sort of strained
heart — may ‘ cease upon the midnight,’ you know, without
giving fair warning. You ought to hear one or two things.
You’ll be one of Molly’s trustees, after me, if you’re of age
then.”

“ Rather the other way round, up to now. Sir,” Auberon

152 ROUGH JUSTICE

said. All this was too moving. He had to take refuge in
a little jocularity.

“ Of course it’s only technical. She’ll run herself. Still,
you might have things to fix up if she ever marries.

“ Yes.”

“ There’s some one wanting to marry her.”

Some one! Wasn’t every one? But all that Auberon
said was “ Victor? ”

“ Victor? ” his father’s voice expressed surprise. Middle-
aged men are often surprised that babes of twenty-three
should think of marrying wives. “ The man I mean,”
said Garth, “ calls himself Fulford.” He looked at Auberon
rather hard.

“ I know. Sir,” Auberon answered the question in his
father’s look.

“ You know who his father is? ”

“ I’ve known — ” Auberon paused to count up — “ for
two years and a half.”

“ Do people at Chellingham know? ”

“ Molly does.”

“ Any one else? ”

“ Not that I’ve ever heard of.”

“ You’ve held your tongue well.”

They had another minute’s stare at the fire. And Molly,
Sir,” Auberon ventured at last: “ what does she say? ”

“ She has not heard about it.”

“ Oh!”

“ You mean it’s queer he should speak to me only? He
has reasons — decent enough. He wants to make good before
he lets on to her. You know — his record? ”

“ Only the cricket. Sir.”

He hadn’t a chance to go straight. His mother died
at his birth. His father’s house was a slum. So he came
the grand smash that he had to — shirking, wasting, booze —

BOOK- FOUR

153

only no foulness with women. I picked him up on the
tow-path with his bones sticking out He wasn’t really a
wrong un: only by accident. So I get him to Chellingham.
All right there, wasn’t he? ”

“ Straightest man in the place.”

“ I thought so. Till he got dowr to that job he hadn’t
ever found out what it’s like to wa*;e up in the morning
and feel that life is a lark because one isn’t a scrub. It
was then he discovered, and now he a n’t letting it go. His
pride is all right. It’s on his mind that he didn’t come
into the house as an equal — ^and that his father’s name stinks
too much to be offered to any one till he makes good- —
that he ought to do something big — at any rate ten years or
so of coolie work before he lets on to the lady. The Jacob
idea, you know — doing time to win Rachel.”

He looked at his watch and rose. “ Not going. Sir! ”
Auberon said in distress. This dismaying talk about Follett
and Molly had finished the wreck of his plan.

Yes, his father must not keep the Warden’s servants out
of their beds. They crossed the quad together in silence,
under the murmuring chestnut trees; they said good night
at the Warden’s door. As Auberon walked off to his
staircase he turned in mid-quad and looked back. A light
came out, as he looked, in a bedroom window of the Warden’s
lodgings. His father must be there. “ Rush back,” some
warm-hearted prompter seemed to say inside him. “ Hammer
on the door till some one comes. Say you must see yoi^‘
father again for a moment — very important.” He almost
obeyed. But the light that had brightened the upper half
of the Warden’s glazed door went suddenly out while he
looked. No, he would be rather a beast to drag that sleepy
maid back now. She would be half-way to bed.

Through an open window on the far side of the quad
there came the poignant beauty of a tenor voice. ‘‘Du

154 ROUGH JUSTICE

meine Seele, du mein Herz,” it sang, insistently lovely, and
he stood to listen. Great stuff, music! The way it said
things that words didn’t say — how the bitterest pain and a
curious sort of delight were mixed together, and hopeless
love itself and helpless estrangement might come trailing a
rending loveliness behind them. He was wretched, wretched,
and yet some sort of poignant grace was abroad; it shed
itself on the air like the smell of wild thyme when you
tread on the plant in the dark. Simply tremendous!

CHAPTER Xll

1

A fter that midnight failure Auberon entered, as
mariners are liable to do, a region of doldrums.
Lor immobile air. Everyth! .g was sunny and
easeful, but mot a capful of wind ca ne to fill the saiis of
his unencouraged wish to live ma fully. During these
second and third of his years at St. Mary’s he laid well and
truly the foundation stones of an ignominious degree at the
end of his fourth. Perhaps he was not one of the meanest
of drifters. He did not quite sink to the grade of the most
paltry shirkers, those who work up in themselves a kind of
contempt for people who put away their toys in good time
and make ready to fight in the firing-line. He had no
sloppy illusions about his rowing and his games; he knew
well enough that merely to shine in these little simulacra of
effortsome life was not playing the man.

Now and then, too, his mind could still be tickled a little
by something that he came across in the dull round of his
reading for the SchooL. No doubt philosophy, in bulk,
was stodge, as every one said; still, there seemed to be some
fetching notions knocking about in it; that one about
“ matter ” and “ form ” was great — the idea of “ form ” as
all the purposeful rightness and beauty there is in a thing or
a person — the lovely, perfect statue that’s somewhere i|p|
every block of stone, only waiting for the right man to chip
away all the clogging formless “ matter ” that clings round
it and keeps it from being the topping thing that it might
be. Fine, too, the notion of how you didn’t really have a
feeling first and then express it, while it just stayed where it
was — how the feeling itself was changed, just by being
expressed ; you let a yell and, behold ! the feeling that made
you yell had moved on into some new state of itself; it had

155

156 ROUGH JUSTICE

changed by issuing in that yell; and so expression wai
feeling, in a way — a mode of feeling, one of teeling’s ways
of completing itself. Great notion! At least, so it seemed
till he put some inexpert expression of delight in it into a
weekly essay for Wetherby, and the old tutor smiled wearily
over the crudity of the phrasing.

Ancient history, too, had to be read for his Greats; and
just before Auberon’s third Easter at Oxford his fumbling
study of the affairs of Rome reanimated one of his childish
hobbies so much that he made up his mind to sneak off to
Rome by himself for the first ten days of the vacation, just
to see what the Forum of Caesar, his secret and infamous
old friend, might look like. He had even taken his ticket —
rather a strain on flagging end-of-term finances. But he
was detected; the sacred name of “ loyalty to the college ”
was invoked; was it fair for a Rugger Blue to go slinking
off, in Skimmery’s hour of need, on some grubby smug
quest of his own? So he was carried off to the North on a
tour of holiday football, instead. The faintly flaming flax
was well quenched again.

After any of these checks had been put upon unseemly
ardour, Auberon would sink back, in a kind of dreamy ease,
and repose himself once more on the pleasing spectacle of
life in Oxford. Just to look round that goodly place and to
let its jolliness soak into him — that was an occupation good
ipough to fill up many whole days. It seemed positive
^ofanation, on sunny mornings of May, to sit alone in a
coldly lit, north-facing room, head down at a book, while
he knew that below in Skimmery porch everything would at
that moment be blithe — men in gowns, with their shaved
morning faces, flitting past or through; new lists and notices
of crews and elevens and meetings going up on the board;
the little chubby college porter running to and fro, eagerly
obliging everybody; out in the broad, quiet street the ^bbies

BOOK FOUR

157

gambling cheerfully among their ant que hansoms, and all
the sparrows alert, under the horses’ heads, to pick out of
the cracks between the cobble stones the least grain of oats
spilt from the nosebags. Alive, ali' e, oh ! — the tingle of
living ran through everything: how could any one reject
the call? At the Beefsteak Club the massed scents of
thousands of cut flowers lying on the market stalls below
would be coming in at the open reading-room window
along with the voices and whistling of popular tunes so
pretty and merry that surely they cou d not die out as others
had done; the London papers would be on the smoking-
room table by now, all excitingly full of things that were
making this the greatest age there ever had been — the first
flight overseas; the new, horseless London; the fight
between the Lords and the Commons, the shouts of rebellion
in Ulster, the capping of warships with Germany. The
mere molecular stir of existence went to his head. Just to
snuggle up close to the good world’s warm body and get the
fullest sense that he could of its genial racket and rhythm —
it seemed almost sin and waste not to do that. It was like
looking on at a fire or hearing a lovely song sung: who
could do anything but attend to it? So each of his terms
told off, in a delicious reverie of idle adoration, its rosary of
golden days.

II

He did nothing beastly. He had no mind to. His sen-
suous joys were those of health — the rapture of the dive
through radiant morning mists from the roof of the Skimmery
barge into the twelve-foot deep at the old mouth of the
Cherwell; the body’s daily sweat, needful as its daily bread;
the nightly melodies of jocund chaff and songs plashing like
unseen fountains under the trees of the great garden quad.
He had no morbid, inflamed sense of sex and he did not
brood^over its m5^teries. Physically puissant like a healthy

158 ROUGH JUSTICE

forest-tree, and super-masculine with the husbanded virility
of the self-controlled, he was simply not bothered at all by
any coarse importunacy of unsatisfied physical instinct.
Possibly this was transmuted into something more subtly
restless — partly an ache of vague longing for closer union
with the beckoning beauty of the visible and audible world;
partly a persistent consciousness of Molly as a figure seen
rather far off and always advancing amazingly, like some late
and quickly-bursting summer, into new marvels of loveliness
outshining memory itself, with every man’s eyes turned
towards her — ^and yet also always receding into some splendid
and enigmatic new condition of herself.

But the mere non-committal of excesses which have not
tempted you may bring but little consciousness of worth.
Compunction pricked Auberon pretty severely during the
last winter and spring before the Day of Wrath that seemed
likely to print the brand of the shirker condignly on his
brown, ingenuous brow. Urged by this goad he offered
sacrifices — real, painful ones, like Abraham’s of Isaac; he
forwent the proffered joy of rowing in the be-puffed and be-
slobbered but still delectable race against Cambridge. He
gave up for a long time the delights of midnight talks
with a friend in a firelit room, when two minds could set
out together on such entrancing voyages of venturesome
exploration.

Most of the hours thus reclaimed from happiness he spent
with his eyes fastened rather more continuously than his
mind upon an open page of some text that he was bidden to
read for the Schools. The winter was rainy and Auberon
heard a good deal of a certain drip of rain from a drenched
eave above his window to a stone pavement below. F'ew
sounds are less cheerful than this pit-a-pat to the ear of any
rueful looker-back across wasted years. The dreary and
incessant rhythm of its incidence suggests the perpetual

BOOK FOUR

»59

pulse of some futile regret. “ All o /er now — irrevocable
now ” — the syllables are almost sound -d in your ears as you
sit alone with that somewhat heartlessl / taunting refrain.

Still, he stuck pretty tight, for twc whole terms, to the
virtuous practice of sitting face-to-face with the classics, with
a numb mind. Nobody helped him t > make the dry bones
come to life. Not a single living mi d was at hand to lift
the opaque veil which the grand old f »rtifying curriculum ”
of his education had drawn between the marriageable beauty
of knowledge and tliis baffled woo r. Obloquy in the
college formed the only reward of his painfully framed
resolve not to row in the Eights in his last summer term, but
to keep his whole time free for work.

And then that last term came, bewitching with beauty;
tingling, too, with that poignant attribute of being the last.
If you knew that in eight weeks you would be dead, how
you would want to rush about and drink once more the cup
of the sweetness of one beloved place and another, and break
up all the stupid reserves that had prevented you from
telling this and that friend how much you had liked them all
the time. Up and down the mellow city of ripe friendships
and of sun-warmed stone, over its little hills and rivers and
among its gardens and birds, were blown the intoxicating
scents of early summer and of a passing away. So the old
impulse, now more untimely than ever, came back with an
irresistible urgency.

Could it be really right to sit alone and frigid, sniffing at
savourless print, with all that fugitive and irrecoverable love-
liness and friendliness flowing away out of doors, running
to waste? Was it not the only gloriousness in life to jump
up, to go out, to embrace it all, to lose nothing of the perish-
able feast, to live glowingly, while he could, in the air and
the sun, with his friends?

i6o ROUGH JUSTICE

III

Colin was still hanging on at St. Mary’s. Ostensibly he
was pursuing into a fifth year the Pass degree which the
gaiety of his youth had not suffered him to achieve at the usual
season. But really he was turning serious. “ Life is real,
life is earnest,” he told Auberon, one radiant Sunday morning:
the two were walking bare-footed through dewy June cow-
slips and long varnished grass, towing up-stream beyond
Eynsham a skiff that had a guest, Claude, reclining at ease
in its stern. “ We’ve been innocent idlers too long. It’s
time we turned robbers.”

“ What’s the fun of it? ” said Auberon doggedly.

“Fun isn’t everything. What about filial duty? I
wouldn’t break with my father for worlds — I don’t know
any man, of his age, more amusing to talk to. But he
suggests that it was time I was spunging on some one not
him.”

“ I suppose,” Auberon faintly suggested, “ there’s no real
work one could do.” He saw, at least dimly, that Chel ling-
ham and St. Mary’s, between them, had disequipped him
pretty thoroughly for the service of the world. They had
made him as competent as a newly hatched sparrow to
keep himself alive if he were suddenly dropped out of the
nest. Outwardly unaggressive, unoriginal, unstudious, anti-
demonstrative, anti-extreme, he exhibited all the approved
negative qualities of the well-to-do English. Of knowledge
to fit him for life on this planet he scarcely had any. He
had to drop out of a conversation when any one mentioned
Donatello or Dalton, or Garibaldi or Lincoln or Pitt; he
did not know the brothers Adam from Adam the brother-
less, could not tell you the names or the paths of three stars,
nor how tramcars were moved, nor how a watch worked,
nor why it was cold in winter. And now he vaguely

BOOK FOUR i6i

suspected the seriousness of such wints, and he had not
conceit enough to keep him quite cheerful.

Colin gaily derided the notion. * What sane man,” he
said, “ would stump up to have his work done in the way
we work here? ”

“ That’s sound,” said Auberon ruefully.

“If we did diddle some simple c.pitalist into taking us
on, to polish the brass and so forth, h* ’d find out in a week.
The only employers that never find < ut are (i) the Church
and ( 2 ) the State. Look at Claude- -they’ve had him two
years in the Army, and yet they don't fire him out. Look
at my father — a diplomat pour rtre^ 1 imagine — but what a
brilliant and comfy career! Once get your name on the
books and they keep paying out, faithful unto death — the
death of the payee.”

Auberon grunted, and Colin resumed: “ You see the
State’s so big it can hold heaps and heaps of duds and not
feel the difference. Much too big a cheese for a few
reasonably cheery maggots to muck it all up.”

Auberon spoke with laboured unconcern: “ Ever think
of the Church?”

“No. I could never make the right faces.”

Auberon said rather shyly: “ Some of the parsons seem
to have got hold of something.”

“ New way of life and so on? ” Colin’s tone was
sympathetic and liberal.

“ Well, something more than pi-jaw and signing Articles.”

“ I don’t deny it, friend,” Colin said. “ No denyings for
me. I’m much too sceptical for that.”

“ Know the Skimmery Mission, in Stepney? ”

“ First I’ve heard of it.”

“ I stayed there last year a bit. The neighbours were
great.”

“ The local plebs? ”

M

i 62 rough justice

“ Yes. Their adventures lick Robinson Crusoe. Fellows
get up and shave and turn out in the morning with nothing
to eat till they’ve earned it. Straight fellows, too. I knew
one that hadn’t had a sov in his hand except once in his life
— and then it was a mistake. He’d got it instead of a bob
from some fat old boy that he’d whistled a cab for. My man
tore after the old fatty’s cab and pushed the quid back on
him. I was there — saw it.”

Colin frankly admired. “ C^est heau^ he said.

“ Still, it’s no wonder your friend is not in big business.”

“ A sahib,” Auberon said. “ Like Early Man, too —
just dumped on the earth, with the job to do every day —
food to get hold of, and some sort of a hole for wet nights.
Queer, you know, to think one was never like that — never
will have been, perJiaps; only a sort of amateur human
being — not a proper, all-in, sink-or-swimmcr, up against
the big adventure bona fide^

Auberon had grown almost fluent. “ Go it,” said Colin.
“ Every man to his vein — for you the tall, the hardy line of
Romance; for me the Picaresque, because I have in my
blood half the rogues of all time.”

“ O, bilge! ” said Auberon.

“ Bilge? You name my element. And so Holy Orders
appeal? ”

^‘^n a way. Not the putting your name to a lot of old
stodge that you know isn’t true except in some funny poetical
sense. It’s the getting close up. to those real people that
fetches me.”

“Pinkhill, by the Rood!” said Colin. “Your turn to
steer.” They drew the boat in to the lonely lock, cast away
in the limitless meads of cuckoo-flower and marsh-marigold,
dreamy now with quivering haze and sabbatical peace.

BOOK FOUR

163

IV

Claude, their guest, had achieved greatness of late. Not
as a cavalry subaltern — there he was r imoured to be nothing
out of the way — but as the best ba^ in the whole British
Army, by a long chalk. So he was ]• t off almost all duty in
summer, to play for the M.C.C. or t se for Wessex, for the
honour of the Army. For the past hree days he had been
staying in Oxford to play and, only yesterday, had scored
120 for the M.C.C. against the University. Out third
wicket and back in the applauding pavilion, Claude had
said, somewhat audibly, to the embarrassed Auberon, “ Well,
I suppose we shall all be out for about 20 more.”

Success had made the blond Claude more solemn than
ever, especially when cricket was mentioned by persons
undistinguished at it; Claude would then become cold and
unbending, as if rude boys were pestering him for his auto-
graph. Colin delighted in this trait of Claude’s, and made
every opening he could for its exhibition. At dinner last
night at the club, with Auberon and Claude, Colin had kept
the talk running on cricket. “ As a matter of fact I scored
1 30, not out, the next day ” ; “ My average that year, as a
matter of fact, was the best of any amateur’s south of Notts ”
— countless admissions like these, made in a voice almost
austere, were elicited by Colin. Auberon had felt that the
phrase “ As a matter of fact ” had somehow divested thele
utterances of anything like swank: it seemed to turn them
into pure passionless history. ^

But Claude’s most frequent theme had been “ the rabbits”
— cricketers of mean capacity. You might have supposed
these poor rodents were really plague-carrying rats, so utterly
did they seem to have darkened whole sunlit worlds in match
after match. Conscience had whipped Auberon, as he
listened, with thoughts of all the rotten cricket that he had

i 64 rough justice

played in his time. “ I raise my glass,” Colin had said,
rather late in the meal, “ to our fearless friend, the Scourge
of the Bunnies.” In a grave voice, with twinkling eyes,
Colin had condoled with Claude in the pain he must feel at
being torn away by duty from a soldier’s darling preoccupa-
tions with his men and their horses till Claude became rest-
less in his chair as though there were unlocatable fleas in his
underclothing.

“ My C.O.,” Claude had said grimly — in answer, per-
haps, to something divined rather than said — “ is not an
absolute fool. Any rabbit can go on parade, but the Colonel
understands the good it does a regiment to have an officer
playing in first-class cricket.”

“ A fine old English Colonel,” Colin had said demurely.
“One of the olden time.” And yet Claude had still had
that itchy appearance.

V

From Pinkhill Lock to Bablockhithe it was Claude and
Colin who towed, walking abreast, with the tow-rope tied
to the middle of a boat-hook held horizontally in front of their
waists. At first they said nothing. Claude, I fancy, always
felt unsafe with Colin; Colin’s talk was pestilently full of
man-traps and spring-guns. Still, it seemed there was some-
thing that Claude wanted to know. “ Had Miss Garth
in Oxford? ” he presently asked.

“ Molly? Not that I know of,” said Colin. “ Any-
thing fo bring her up just now? ”

“ Well, a little decent cricket, shall we say? ” Claude
answered in rather bitter reproof. “ Was it true,” he went
on after a little, “that that fellow Fulford had had the
cheek to be looking her way? ”

Colin asked, “ Doesn’t every one? **

Claude protested: “ My good sir, the man is a menial.”

“ He might have been a rabbit. I should have thought

BOOK FOUR 165

you’d class him, on his batting alone, as one of the best
matches in Europe.”

“ I suppose he’ll retire after a bit,” said Claude darkly,
“ and keep a small tuck-shop.”

“ So did my grandmother’s father. In Chicago. Acid
drops were his staple, I fancy.”

“ Well, I’ve some respect for Miss Garth.”

“ Might even have — cast an eye?- -hey? — if only Nevin
hadn’t ”

“ What the hell has he to do with i:? ”

“ Isn’t that what all the little love - sick beggar - boys
said when King Cophetua came butting in and cut them
out? ”

“ Can’t say I follow you. Kevin’s simply an ‘ in-
tellectual.’ Better turned out. I’ll admit, than the ruck of
them. Still, he’s simply a damned intellectual.”

Claude gloomed for a while. Then Colin said sweetly,
“ Come to think of it, the lady will be here, quite soon.
Eights Week, you know — week after next. Victor too, I
believe.”

Claude grunted.

“ They come for the Saturday — the rising barrister’s half-
holiday, you know. Why not come too, just to make a
last stand? ”

Can’t. I shall be playing at Lord’s.”

“ Again! — that clarion call of duty! Well, there’s plenty
of willow at Lord’s to make you a garland. Bron and I
can go for ours to the Cherwell, up by Marston Ferry.”

“Bron! You!” A dull amazement filled Claude’s
face. “ Well, I’m damned! ”

“ We all are,” Colin said, “ except Nevin.”

Auberon, viewing these two from behind, some eighty
feet off, perceived regretfully a certain expressiveness in
Claude’s broad back — something of stiffness, of cold guarded-

i66 ROUGH JUSTICE

ness — what there is in a dog when he slowly approaches a
strange and possibly noxious dog. Queer, Auberon mused
— the way some fellows never get on together, though
they’re perfectly all right really, both of ’em.

VI

Steering a towed boat is conducive to musing. The
business of keeping her nose well out of the force of the
stream, and yet clear of bushes and headlands and shoals, is
constant but light; the gliding rhythm of small noises as the
bank slides past, the mildly resistant lapping of the water
under the inshore bow, the little whispering swish that runs
along the gunwale now and again when it rubs softly past
some jutting tussock of grass and buttercups — all this run of
minor melodies helps your own thoughts to trip along
fluently.

Plenty to muse upon, too, with Molly and Victor coming
on Saturday week. Mrs. Barbason was motoring down
from town for that day to see friends at the House: she had
offered Molly and Victor a lift, there and back; Auberon
was to give the two of them tea between the races and dine
them at the old Mitre before they were borne back to
town?

Molly coming! Molly soon to be moving about in
Auberon’s room at St. Mary’s! He saw already the marks
of her glove on the back of her hand when she would take
it off and drop it on a chair. She would look at his two
dozen books and his more numerous pewter rowing prizes
with the affectionate interest of grown-up people in the small
contraptions of children. So it had been, last summer,
when the Skimmery eight had been in training at Henley.
His father and Molly had come, the week-end before the
regatta, to stay at The Shanty, the Nevins’ palatial cottage
near Shiplake, and Auberon had walked from Henley on

BOOKFOUR 167

the Sunday morning and Molly had met him at the Nevins’
garden gate.

He had seen her from half a mile Dff, waiting for him, a
white speck moving about under the [ ateway arch of honey-
suckle and wild roses. If he had n( v^er known his malady
until then, he would have known it 1 y the pang he had felt
at her untroubled eagerness to gi jet him. A beloved
younger brother, home from school- -not a bit more, not a
bit more.

“You good, familiar object!” she had exclaimed — this
wondrous disturbing grown woman who had once been his
chum. She had thrust her arm under his to lead him on to
the house. “ Say you feel shy and frightened,” she had
said, “ as I do, in this shiny place.”

That garden, indeed, was all putting-green lawns and
brilliant blooms trained to the hour, like oarsmen. “ And
all the boathouse sticky with paint,” Molly had said. “The
poor flies are hardly dead in it yet. And oh! the women’s
clothes ! I’m the dowd of the place because I’m not changing
all day. Thanks be for your dear baggy knees, you real
live person.” And then she had pressed his arm fondly,
close to her side, and he had pressed hers in return and
accepted the bounds set by fate.

Joyce Nevin, the only child of the house besides Victor,
had grown up into something that Auberon remembered
now as alarming indeed — tall, very dark, very handsome no
doubt, always dressed up to the nines, a marvel of social
expertness, and yet rather like somebody half absorbed in
looking for something that she had mislaid — and almost
angry with humble people like himself for not knowing
what it was, or for wanting to know — which he didn’t — or
doing the wrong thing somehow or other. Jove! How
she had dropped on him!

On that hot Sunday afternoon at Shiplake, the four young

t68

ROUGH JUSTICE

people had tea’d by themselves in the Nevins’ Hesperidean
orchard, looking out lazily over the river. “ ‘ Ploughing
the water,’ ” Victor had murmured pensively, as some boat
passed. “ ‘ The boat ploughs the water.’ Stale metaphor
— really quite good, though, when new. I wonder who
said it first. Noah, perhaps. I wish it had been 1.”

And then Auberon had been smitten — he shuddered to
think of it now — with one of his few impulses to take a
line of his own. “’Fraid it shouldn’t really plough the
water,” he had said rashly.

“ Quoi donc^ O literal one? ” Victor had smiled in-
dulgently as he spoke. “ Should it harrow it? ”

At that, Auberon had laboured clumsily to make his
point — that all these light river boats, as it seemed to him,
had to be lifted up, more or less, on to the top of the water
with the first part of your stroke, and then kept sliding
forward there, over the slippery top.

Victor’s face had expressed an amused scepticism. “ To-
bogganing? I see,” he had said in his sweet tone of ironic
humility. And when Auberon was gravelled by this hand-
ling and said nothing more, Joyce had burst in. “ Argue,
Bron. Stick to your point,” she had said, with a little
frown that made the soft dark down on her upper lip look
quite angry. Just to oblige, he had tried to keep up his
end for a few moments more, with no hope of prevailing,
till Victor’s expression of having mercy on humble absurdity
prostrated him altogether. And, even then, Joyce had flung
across at Auberon another of those goading looks. “ Take
your own part. Why don’t you take your own part? You
know what you’re talking about, and he doesn’t,” that look
of scornful incitement seemed to convey.

But what was the use? Wasn’t it all only talk? Nothing
would have to be done on the strength of it. And old
Vick must be right in some higher sense than the merely

BOOK FOUR

169

mechanical one, some lofty, poetical sense. And, besides,
there had been Molly to look at, just for that day, and you
could not look at Molly while you we e trying to argue with
somebody. Molly had to be looked at almost constantly
now, she was changed so amazingly ach time he saw her,
and every time the sight of her overv helmed him with new
ideas of the mystery and majesty of young womanhood —
not its splendour of colour and glow and soft curvilinear
loveliness only, the ripening of fruit an 1 the mantling of roses,
but also the queenly creature’s air of immersion in some
mystic adventure — some affair of rising exaltations, daunting
previsions, tremendous choices. A match had been struck
as they sat out of doors in the dark after dinner at Shiplake
that night, he with his eyes on the place where Molly’s
unseen face must be; so he had suddenly seen her face
revealed as it had been under cover of night, its lips slightly
opened, its eyes almost glazed with intentness, so fixedly had
they been fastened on that point in the darkness where
Victor’s face now came into sight.

Of course he had not seen that a third pair of eyes was
as glassily fixed on the portion of darkness hiding his own
honest mug. A very strong man in the bodily way, Auberon
looked stronger still. Rowing develops the forearms: the
mighty breadth and swell of Auberon’s showed puissant
thongs of lithe sinew flicking and interplaying visibly under
a skin embrowned to a deep walnut colour with many
summers of sunburn — brownest of all where the huge arm,
at its imposing maximum of visible power, had passed under
the tucked-up sleeves of a white shirt when Auberon had
sculled stroke that afternoon and Joyce, in the stern, was
sitting face to face with him, his knuckles almost touching
her knees each time he swung forward. Auberon framed
scarcely any visions of himself. It did not cross his mind
that to a woman of disengaged heart and of sane vital ardour

170 ROUGH JUSTICE

he might appear as a new revelation of sun-fed strength
almost incredible in its simple sanity and unconsciousness,
like a young oak, or a whole forest, or Nature itself — all that
Adam had to offer to the senses of Eve.

What he remembered most clearly of that Shiplake day
was not so much any one’s doings as the look and the feel of
everything at certain moments — the kind coolness of the
twilight with the measured dip and low plash of sculls and
chimes of quiet laughter coming up the garden slope from
boats going home, some with a single Chinese lantern
hanging by a string from an invisible mast-head, the little
globe of light swinging aft at each forward thrust of the boat,
and more slowly back; and then the subsiding of those dis-
tinguishable sounds and the relative rise of the river’s own
more intimate night voice, drowned during the day — the
murmurous sum of all the private proceedings of the stream,
its little lappings against piles and rafts, its infinitesimal
babblings round snags and whispering passage among swaying
reeds and long streaming grasses, the confidential purr with
which the whole Thames nestles in under his banks and
stows his waters snug and even; and then the homeward
walk along the deeply shaded Henley road, where little jets
of low laughter and whispered talk came from rustic lovers
hidden in every recess of shadow deeper than the rest; and
the clearing, near Marsh Lock, where he had leant on a
roadside wall and looked down for a while at the long
lasher’s sloping line of cold foam, with its everlasting old
tune, and had somehow felt desperately out of it and left to
himself and yet ready to cry with a kind of \ov at the
loveliness of it all.

CHAPTER Xill

I

J OYCE NEVIN was, as you kr )w, a regular glass of
fashion and mould of form. Stil she saluted in Molly
the right that some rare and bes itiful women have to
dress as they please and let fashion go hang. “ Molly,”
she said to Victor after breakfast that S iturday morning when
Mrs. Barbason was to motor him anc Molly to Oxford, “ is
dressed to perfection, always.” JoyC( spoke with a touch of
contempt, as though she meant, “ Wh y should I have to tell
you all this? ”

“ My dear, I don’t dissent,” said Victor serenely.

“ Molly,” said Joyce, “hardly ever wears just what the
rest of us do. But any woman who sees her, and isn’t a
fool, says to herself, ‘ She has got there, and I haven’t.’ And
yet Molly doesn’t know she has got there, any more than
she knows she’s the loveliest woman there is.”

“ They are rather dears — all the Garths,” Victor said
musingly.

“ They’re heaps more than dears.”

“ Oh, yes, they have their patiney

“ I should think so. Imagine any relation of ours
chucking all the big vulgar prizes, as Mr. Garth did! ”

“Yes — a Cato de nos jours. And hasn’t the young
Artemis some mighty scheme of self-immolation as well? ”

“ Yes — a ‘ games mistress ’ job — the worst-paid she could
find. At some monster day-school in London — in one of
the desert parts that you see from the train, going to Scotland.
She thinks the girls in those parts can’t be getting half the
games they should. So she must see to it. And, once she

starts, she’ll work there till she dies — unless ” Joyce

paused, glanced at the clock, and then plunged: “ Victor,
marry her, quick. You may be too late.”

I7I

172 ROUGH JUSTICE

“ Rivals — hey? ” In Victor’s voice there was no con-
sternation.

“ Don’t you ever look at anybody? Not at Claude?
^or Colin March? Nor at the mystery man who’s a
cricket pro and dines at the Chantry? Nor any one else?
Not that it’s any one else who’s your danger. It’s Auberon.”

Victor playfully expostulated: “ Bron! My Bron, that
has fed from my hand! My good Joyce, they’re brother
and sister. And Bron is a Dobbin, a true Suffolk Punch, a
dear Goodman Dull.”

Joyce had moved round to the back of Victor’s chair.
“ Can’t you see? ” she said. “ That makes her sorry. It
hurts her when Bron doesn’t shine. Can’t you conquering
Apollos understand that big noble babies like Bron are
terribly winning? — they want help so much, and women —
some women, ones like Molly — want to help people.”

Victor, in his turn, looked at the clock. “ Oh, Zeus! ”
he said, “ the Barbason will be here in live minutes.”

II

For some four hundred yards down the stream, below
Folly Bridge, the many college barges of Oxford embroider
the left bank with a gaily figured hem of quaint shapes and
dissimilar colours. In June an awning of great boughs
rustles and sways above them; it throws a changeful chequer-
work of light and shade down on this strip of lively pattern.
Up from the water, too, which is being constantly broken
by punt-poles, paddles and oars, there plays a perpetual
discharge of jets of dancing light, reflected or refracted from
the shifting ripples. So on each of the six afternoons of the
Eights, when the balustraded roofs of the barges, empty at
most other times, break out into blossom with the festal hats
and dresses of undergraduates’ sisters and mothers, all this
long floral border gains from its doubly animated illuming-

BOOK FOUR

*73

tion a look of shimmering vivacity. To a sympathetic mind
this effect may seem to be reinfon ed by many fugitive
gleams and exchanges of less literal rays bet^veen the molecules
of the holiday company — eyes taking light at each other, all
the fugitive sparks struck out of youth on contact with youth.

From one particular speck in this ‘ lining scene there was
not projected, at one particular moment on that Saturday
afternoon, any ray of care-free jo* undity. This incon-
siderable dot was Auberon. Standing a little behind his
two guests, Molly and Victor, on the high poop of the
Skimmery barge, he was being gniwed by that anxious
instinct of hospitality which, like love, feareth all things,
lest any be forgotten that should have been remembered.
And now, a mere twenty minutes before the Second Division
race was to start, his heart stood still for an instant as he
remembered a damning gap in his arrangements for tea in
his rooms at Skimmery after the race. Cream for the
strawberries ! — clean forgotten !

Nothing to do but bolt at once, buy the stuff at a little
shop that he knew, and hie away to his rooms, to set it out
decently, with the rest of the spread, on his table. He
thought, for a few seconds, of buying the cream as the three
walked back to the college. No, that wouldn’t do. It was
beastly for people to see their host wrestling, up to the last
moment, with the labour of entertaining them.

He drew a little closer to the other two, to make his
excuses. Neither of them seemed to hear him at first:
they were not talking, and yet they were absorbed, as if
thoughts were passing between them better than by means
of words. A sharp sense of being outside, and unwanted,
hurt Auberon. But he could not stay there, hanging
around the closed gates of their privacy. He touched
Victor’s arm.

Victor turned slowly; Molly more quickly, her face aglow

174 ROUGH JUSTICE

with kind compunction. Molly’s face had always been like
that when she had been roused out of any little reverie of
hers, to find Bron wanting something. Oh, he knew that
touch — the maternal — the womanly business — the feeling
women had that a moment’s attention not given to a child’s
appeal was guilt and confusion. He said he “ had got to
mess around for a bit ” — would they come straight up to
his rooms after the race? Then he slipped off the barge
and away up the avenued walk to Christ Church and the
city.

Ill

The woman in the little dairy shop had been amused at
Auberon before; he had not minded carrying a tiny milk-
can, all unwrapped, through the streets. She wondered now
at the big flannelled figure. Not down at the river! How
she wished she could "be at that centre of things! Well, he
must be a queer one.

From the shop to St. Mary’s he walked through streets
almost empty; colleges and houses had been drained of their
occupants by the suction of the day’s spectacle. The very
roses looked world-forgotten that nodded at his open bed-
room window, over the silent Fellows’ Garden and the
river meadows beyond. As he stopped to smell a rose there
came sleepily booming, from out of the shimmer of heat
that winked lazily over the distant starting-place of the race,
the sound of the five-minute get-ready gun: slowly the big
blunt sound shouldered its way, like some gentle giant,
through the scent-crowded air that hung heavily over the
low water meadows: they looked almost dazzled to-day
with their own flaming floor of multitudinous buttercups.
The Skimmery crew would be shoving out now from the
bank — the happy fellows, about to burst into their five rap-
turous minutes of peace and joy past all understanding.
Probably they would be thinking him rather a beast not to

BOOK FOUR

175

be down there at the start, holding the watch, ready to
measure them out the critical ten seco ids before the last gun
slipped them from the leash — he t lat had failed them
already by not rowing himself. W( uid they think, “ He
might have shown a little interest ” ? What stools and stools
there were to fall between!

He decanted his cream with mu h care, held a final
review of the whole provision of cakt s, scones and the like,
and made, after deep thought, a slight change in the lay-out
of the many flowers that he had boug it in the market early
this morning in honour of his visitors Then all was done
that man could do, and he sat down on the broad cushioned
seat running round inside his big-bayed oriel window, to
wait.

This oriel looked into an inner quadrangle. So it was
only as something drowsier than the five-minute gun that
the boom of the one-minute gun came to him now, muffled
by the intervening masses of masonry. The eight would
be all ready now for the start; bow and two would be holding
her up to the stream; the wee cox, all wariness, shrillness
and gumption, his starting-rope in his left hand and both
rudder-lines in his right, would be scoring every lawful inch
for his men. Auberon jumped up and opened his bedroom
door, to hear better. How he had loved that last minute,
when rowing! Nervous? Why, they were the least
nervous minutes in life — nothing to choose or arrange or
decide; only the deep happiness of the fit body waiting to
let itself go and feeling it could bend the world.

The dull gun boomed again; and then, quick in the wake
of its muted bass, there came a little puff of shouting, weak
and remote, but suddenly deepening the cloistral depth of
silence in the empty college. Across the hot stone of the
quadrangle’s opposite wall an afternoon shadow was creeping;
over the warm short grass a pinnacle of the chapel threw a

176 ROUGH JUSTICE

slowly lengthening spire of a darker green; two sparrows
hopped about in this solitude, giving by turns a twitter and
then a few hops and a sidelong glance of enquiry up at the
strangely uninhabited buildings. The place which Auberon
was soon to quit had put on the heart-searching charm that
invests every human haunt or construction from which the
high tide of life has ebbed away — gardens long played in by
children now grown up or dead, the dusty flowers left after
a ball, or old broken arches of stone shining white in sad
sunshine across silent fields.

The faint noise of the distant shouting rose a little as the
crowd of men running alongside the boats came nearer and
grew more eager. The sparrows cocked their heads to
lister\: the boats must be coming up out of the Gut, into
sight from the barges; Molly and Victor would now be
gazing down -stream, close together, linked in the same
thrill.

IV

Auberon must have fallen a-musing rather deeply; for he
was only roused by the first footsteps and voices of people
coming back to college from the river through the extremely
resonant tunnel-like passage that led into this back quad from
the front one. Once roused, he fastened his eyes on the
dark mouth of the tunnel. At any time now that arched
frame might hold Molly, full length, a white figure clear on
an almost black background of shadow: he must not, on
any account, lose that sight of her. Many other dresses,
quite unmagical, rustled through the arch, with little noises
of silk rubbed on silk, and flitted off to other men’s rooms.
And then at last Molly was framed in the arch.

Far off as he was, he saw in her face that what was to
happen had happened since he left her on the barge. She
was transfigured; taller, more columnar than ever, as
though the body had sprung up to match some new exalta-

BOOK FOUR

177

tion within. But her face was the most wonderful thing.
A kind of pensive radiance filled it, a lustre of beatitude;
through the lamp’s beautiful walls *here glowed the new
flame that lights and warms the spirit of a woman in whom
the great annunciation has come to a clean, unsquandered
heart?

He went to meet them at his dcor. But Molly came
alone, A don who, like all the Skim aery dons, had idolised
Victor, had caught him in the quad, and Molly had slipped
on, up the stairs. Auberon met her at his “ oak,” or outer
door, where the shadowy turret stair seemed dark after the
outer sunlight. Her dazzled eyes missed a step and she
stumbled forward a little, catching the hand that he held
out to steady her. So they came into his room, he backwards,
leading her on, with his face to her, seeing her well. Why,
he had seen nothing, just now, when she stood in the arch
— nothing to what he saw now of the intensity of life and
joy that seemed to disengage themselves from her features —
as if the very envelope of flesh were wearing thin and the
delighted spirit shining through, unashamed of its ecstasy.

For a moment Aubcron’s breath was taken away, as he
stood holding her hand; he had to lower his eyes, like one
dazed. So that was what a perfect woman happy in her
love was like!

She looked at him kindly and rather appealingly. Was
she wanting to tell him, but not quite finding the words?
He got up some sort of a brotherly smile and began as if
something outside him were choosing absurd things for him
to say: “Sister Ann, sister Ann, what do you see? You
look gay.” There, somehow, the playfulness stopped and
he just said, still holding her hand, “ O, I know,” and they
had no more need to explain.

“ You’re glad, Bron? ” she almost begged, in great haste,
with her eyes shining unbelievably liquid and dark from

N

178 ROUGH JUSTICE

under the roses of her wide hat. “ Say you’re happy about
it. You know I won’t let it ever take Victor away from
you.”

He dropped his eyes before the searching honesty of hers.
“ Vick,” he said, “ is the only man fit for you in the whole
world.” He bent down as he made her this gift, and kissed
the back of the hand that he was holding.

It brought his head below her face, and Molly stooped
and kissed his brown hair, and saw nothing.

V

They dined at the Mitre Hotel, where people have been
dining now for some seven hundred years with only the
thickness of a window between their shoulders and the
perpetual stream of -gowned and ungowned walkers who
brush past in the street.

The wide low room was festally full; lamps were already
lit, but the blinds still undrawn, and day lingered outside; in
the gay mingled light the talk at the many tables began to
buzz blithely. Auberon’s table for his guests was so close
to one of the shallow broad bays of glass that the rub of
shoes on the pavement outside came to him every time like
a whisper conveyed up his spine: each unknown wayfarer
hurrying past set a very faint shadow flitting across the white
table and Molly’s fair dress and then vanishing swiftly —
“ As much to us as each of us is to Oxford,” Victor said
with his elegant light melancholy. “ As the leaves come
and go,” he quoted, with other apt tags. He knew how to
quote unbookishly, and to play the gentleman more than
the scholar; he used such things like shades, prettily figured,
to beautify the light of festal candles.

Auberon had no power of taking his ease in Holies of
Holies. The old lines came new and unbated to him; yes,
like a flitting of insignificant feet past a window, so had his

BOOK FOUR

179

youth passed, idle and void. But away with this musty
musing about his own scrubby affa rs: he was a host to-
night; at the moment now drawing dreadfully near Molly
must not go away with any memories that were not jolly
ones of this her great day. He scr ^wed himself up to his
job; he called them “young peopli,” and drank to their
very good health with a fatherly s id benedictive air and
some confidential touching of glasses; he chattered, as he
had hardly done in his life, about a k r of old things of which
he knew little — about the Skimmer\ men who were going
to Ulster to fight in the Long Vac.- — they were trusting to
Carson to bring off his great civil war before the Michaelmas
term; and about the queer tales Colin had from his father
of rich Germans who were not going to the Alps this summer
— ^and German officers who were getting no leave, and what
not? — Gad! it was a gay old time, with every one wanting
to set about somebody else.

Victor was kind to Bron’s little conversational efforts.
And Molly followed their talk lightly, only throwing out a
few words now and then to help old Bron along.

Over Carfax Tower a single star was gemming a sky
still faintly flushed when the three came out of the Mitre
to the big open car waiting without. Colin, it seemed, had
dined where Mrs. Barbason had, and she had brought him
on: he stood now on the pavement receiving debonairly one
of her point-blank discharges of robust counsel. “ Never
mind the old books,” she was shouting, “ See life — every
bit of it — like a man — like your father I don’t mean, get
drunk every night.”

Colin smilingly promised to fight against the temptations
of study. Then he turned to the ancient inn door. “ Ah,
here,” he said, “ are our young friends.”

Mrs. Barbason frankly preferred to sit beside her chauf-
feur; her old toes, she said, liked the engine’s heat after

i8o ROUGH JUSTICE

sunctown; Molly and Victor must sit together, behind;
“You’ve the hot blood of youth for your feet,” she said.
She looked at them sharply.

Molly turned in time to wave a hand before the firm
curve of the street sheared the car out of their sight as it
swept around to Magdalen Bridge. Auberon had stood
fast on the kerb, awaiting that wave and returning it eagerly.
Colin watched him with good-humoured patience.

They walked away, Auberon flat and silent in the empti-
ness that now remained; he forgot even to smoke. Colin
was silent too for a while; he had tact; doubtless he had
read the case at sight, life being his favourite book, as Mrs.
Barbason advised. “ So? ” he presently said.

The word must have conveyed a good deal, for its size;
for Auberon’s answer was, “ Yes, they’re booked, right
enough.”

Colin put his arm through Auberon’s. “ Do we go
hang ourselves? ” he said. “ Or is it billiards, billiards,
while the night is young? ” His voice was very friendly.

Auberon stoutly said No: his schools were to be on in a
week; he must go and mug up the stuff.

Colin commended this resolution. His own schools, he
said, were not due for a fortnight: “ So I have time to
turn round.” He said good-night and departed to some
jovial haunt, perhaps to rouse the night owl with a catch.

VI

Auberon walked on towards Skimmery. Nearing the
gate he checked, and stood still, feeling how indescribably
empty his room was going to be, after its glorious fullness
five hours ago. He turned and walked along, aimlessly,
into the shadowy Turl, where he had walked on his first
day in Oxford, and out across the Broad into the leafy
arcades of St. Giles. Everywhere figures flitted about in

BOOK FOUR

i8i

the dusk; the cool air was awash with voices and little
laughter from people at ease after th*’ day. He had always
liked that, but what good was it now ? The visionary light
was gone — it must be shining now ar — where? He looked
at his watch. Yes, about the top of the Chilterns by now;
fleeting between the old Nettlebed houses, the car would
be throwing about the wild shafts f light from its head-
lamps or sliding down the long slope through beeches and
then along the Fair Mile into Hen ey. He saw the little
surging lift of the car to the bridge; and the broken lights
on the water below. He had to walk about, faster and
faster.

About the time when the last deep blue was’ out of the
sky, he stopped for a moment, near the Rdartyrs’ Memorial.
A ring of Salvation Army people were winding up their
outdoor service with a hymn that they were always singing.
“ I do believe, I do believe,” came its refrain, with the
hackneyed words made insistently joyous, as if they had only
just been hit upon, to give tongue to some sudden passion.
The singing women looked almost exhausted with standing,
and yet radiant, being possessed, beyond all sense of fatigue,
by an absorbing fervour. Yes, these people had got hold
of something, say what one might; they had made fast;
they had done with drifting; they rode steadily at their
moorings. Perhaps they saw Christ all the time as he had
seen Christ for a few weeks after he first went to church,
as some one heartrendingly dear, to weep and work and
wear oneself out for.

Something had got to be done. He couldn’t go on like
this, whining inwardly over his failures. It was too shabby.
An old longing invaded him once more, not to be always
one of the petty, worthless potterers and shirkers. To loaf
and cadge till one died, never once to have stood up to life,
all the time — it was too scrubby. He hurried back to

iS2 ROUGH JUSTICE

Skimmery, got out his books and sat down to work, head
down to the table, among the flagging flowers left from the
afternoon’s festival.

Never had it been so hard to keep his mind jammed up
against the meaning of what he read. Word by word he
read it doggedly, but no meaning would come. He had
heard of the dodge of sponging the head with cold water,
to make oneself read with more profit. He went to his
bedroom and did it and then stood for a minute or two at
the window, looking out over the mist-blanketed meadows.

The peace of the Sylvester night was perfect; he felt he
almost could hear the purr of the car as it licked up the long
Maidenhead street and threaded its way between the less
continuous lights to the bridge; again the bespangled sheen
of the Thames would be under their eyes; at Boulter’s Lock,
on their left, a lantern would move about as it swung in
the lock-keeper’s hand; it would shine with the enigmatic
beauty of lanterns carried about in the night. He worked
out his vision; he thought of points of the compass; yes,
Victor might now be seeing Molly’s face engraved in profile
on a sky just growing luminous where the moon was rising
behind Dorney and Burnham. He turned from the window
and sat down again to flog the straggling mind back to its
job. It would not come.

Well, at least he might put in the time, stowing dates.
Last term he had made out a list of the Roman History
dates that he must really know before the exam. Dates
did not need understanding. Dates could be learnt by heart
on the march. He took out the list and walked about his
room, repeating internally all the dates he could remember
and trying to cram up the others.

It went pretty well for three or four dates; then, without
any previous sense of having lost hold, he awoke, as it were,
with a start from some state of himself in which the big car

BOOK FOUR

183

had been traversing Slough, now all abed, and crossing the
sluggard Colne and speeding past 'he cavalry sentries at
Hounslow into the slattern town of M inns and highway-
man legends. Clearly the only way ^o get on with his work
without these breaks was to keep on repeating the dates
aloud and never stop; then he woi id know when he was
beginning to moon and maunder ag in. He did it, taking
great care to look instantly at the list, the moment the
sound of his voice ceased at a forgott m date. On that plan
the night’s business ran on pretty w .*11 till the car that was
running alongside slowed down a little, left the main London
road and struck off southward alor g the silent and tree-
shaded by-road to Gistleham, to drop Molly at home. She
would go straight to his father, to tell him her news; he
would be in the study; his head and shoulders were black
in the little luminous circle round his one reading-lamp; he
rose as she came in.

Confound it! Auberon’s voice had stopped, for ever so
long. He supposed the only way to get anything done,
with this rotten old brain that he had, was to keep his hands
moving hard, the whole time. Yes, manual labour — that
was the tip. He took some ruled exercise paper and sat
down to write out his list of dates over and over again, like
a boy’s imposition at school. Then at last he worked on,
without further break. His mind could be anywhere now,
doing anything, or nothing, while the pen drove on. Not
the faintest image arose before him of the thrilling figure he
had seen in his boyhood, shouting orders at the ford, as he
wrote again and again, far into the small hours: “ Caesar
invaded Britain, b.c. 54.” With some assistance from
unreciprocated love, the education most highly reputed
among the Englishry of Auberon’s class had fairly completed
its work on him.

BOOK FIVE

CHAPTER XIV

1

I T had struck five on the last afternoon before the
world broke, and the sun was now going down on a
number of things besides landscapes. Twilight soon,
and Hesper would light up the lamps of the sky for the last
evening’s reign of the British gold pound over all the pleasant
places of Europe: Miirren, Marienbad, Venice, Cortina —
its bright orb had reigned regally throughout them, levying
for us islanders the kindly fruits of the Continental earth.

The old England, too, the one that was still feudal at
heart, had come to her death-bed at last. Only six or seven
hours now and all her ancient belfries, from Winchester
up to Durham and Carlisle, would be tolling their twelve
strokes apiece for her passing. She died hard, the glorious
old jade. A little wicked in her time, and now wizened,
she lay handsome to-night, with the fine bones showing well
through the skin that was turning to wax. At any rate for
what was left of that lustroyts Tuesday in August, people
would stay in the classes to which it had pleased God or
some other authority to call them; cows would stand still
to be milked; ale would be good at twopence a glass; and all
the young men whom you liked would remain alive, with two
arms to them each, and two legs, to employ in such tranquil
pursuits as lawn-tennis in sunny gardens over the shining
waters of the Thames, if it were their blest portion — or
else to stretch them on hot turf among roses, as Victor and
Auberon did at this moment, utterly at peace, as it still
seemed, with all men and the gods, in spite of the current
talk about war.

An airman flying over the Chantry lawn might have seen
them as two white figures crucified on a green board — their

184

BOOK FIVE

185

flannelled arms as well as legs lay out so straight and loose
in a yawn-like ecstasy of idle extension. Both lay face
upward; Auberon, the more rudin entary organism, was
merely blinking luxuriously up at the sun, like a cat engaged
in its devotions; Victor, the civilised connoisseur of sensa-
tions, had closed both his eyes an^: was now appraising
justly the sun’s effective way of suf asing the living flesh-
tints of his eyelids, as seen from winnin, with an exquisite
and luminous rosiness.

Sated with this exercise of the iritical faculty, Victor
moved his head slightly, half opened his eyes, and proceeded
to feed his fine sense of colour and form on the gracious
river frontage of the Chantry. “ Bron ! ” he presently called,
in a voice lazily low and yet as clear-edged as cut glass.

But Bron was entranced in the mystic reverie of all
basking cats. Victor forbore, for some seconds, to break
in on this ecstatic torpor. Then he called gently again.
“ Bron! Goodman! ”

Bron emerged from the depths. “ Speaking? ” he said.

“ Who built this amiable house? ”

“ Father might know,” said Auberon vaguely. Then,
pulling himself together, he attempted greater precision.
“ Some mediaeval josser, I fancy.”

“ Clearly,” said Victor. “ And rather a latish one
Some genial soul — I mean josser. He must have felt
rather chirpy — feeling the Middle Ages were thawing out
now and a fellow needn’t live in a fort any more.”

Even their tongues relapsed into indolence. A drowsy
cooing of doves came from the region of the stables; vapour-
ous gold-dust floated dreamily over the gilded path that ran
along the river from under the sinking sun to their half-
closed eyes; over all the visible interfusion of garden, field
and river a mellowness that was not yet definite seemed to
brood; not exactly the first film of autumnal embrownment;

i86 ROUGH JUSTICE

only a kind of pervasive premonition that this was at hand;
a few days, a few weeks, and the whole picture would begin
to attain its deepest unity under that rich and soft varnish.

Victor’s silent gaze approved it all. The atmosphere was
Tennysonian, even Virgilian; it came up to the mark; it
set off well a landscape emblazoned with so many emblems
and marks of the ancientry esteemed by people of culture.
Incipient autumn, the delicate fey air of impending decay,
sat well on those distinguished deposits of Time’s, themselves
decaying with an august composure; it helped to keep
Gistleham well up in the same rank as muskily fragrant old
tapestries, worm-eaten windmills that rust on ancient fields
of battle, and sacring bells of fine metal worn smooth by
celebrant hands in Umbrian churches before the Reforma-
tion was thought of. Just the place for a man’s bride to
come out of — a jewel like those that kings get, to put in
their crowns, from the mouldering treasure-chests of Moguls
who lost, long ago, everything but their fame. Decidedly,
Victor approved.

II

For a good twenty mii>utes nothing was said. Then
Auberon turned his face sideways, just enough to see
Victor’s. “ Hi ! ” he said cheerfully. “ Vick! ”

“ Sir? ” Victor answered, patiently. Poor old Bron, of
course, would say nothing new, nor anything to the purpose.
Still, even that rudimentary system of impulses and reactions
had its quaint charm. So Victor answered patiently.

“ You’re doing a fat lot of chat,” Auberon chid, with no
trace of real reproach in his voice.

Victor could have foretold the actual words. Had they
not played together on nursery floors? When they had
played apart for a while, in those earliest days, each absorbed
in his own toys, and all was going well with Bron’s play,
Bron would come across now and then to touch Victor’s

BOOK FIVE

187

arm and “ Friends? ” before re-immersing himself in his
own privy joys. The words might be different now, but
the sense of them was the same — ^just ‘‘ Friends? ”

Victor murmured forbearingly, “ The unruly member,
you know,” and the silence settled in again. Sunshine and
peace soaked into their senses, minut*^ by minute, Auberon
adored the sun while Victor’s eyes res ed on Auberon lazily,
“ Bron! ” he presently breathed.

“ Speaking? ” said Auberon.

“ May I say there are points,” Victor said sweetly, “at
which you resemble Cologne — I mean the notorious
Cathedral.”

“ Don’t know the institution,” Auberon said. A sporting
life had made an untravelled man of him.

The audible overflow of Victor’s indolent reverie trickled
melodiously on. “ The thews, the stature, bulk and big
assemblance of you both! The might without magic! ”

Auberon gave a small, friendly grunt. This, too, Victor
could have foretold. And he knew what it meant — that of
course Vick was a scholar and a wit, so that a fellow couldn’t
tell what on earth he was at, but still he was all right — no
harm in his chaff.

Victor’s word-carving voice trailed languidly on, muted
and yet clear, like a flute heard across fields that drowse in
midsummer heat: “Of course God made the one, and the
Devil the other. Still, both of you are temples not made
with hands. And neither of you much given to breaking out
into surprises — blossoms and lances and songs and new lights
thrown into yourselves, like Reims and Amiens.”

Auberon listened, nonplussed but unhurt. Old Vick was
going it. Sure to be good stuff, too, if one could only make
it out. Then, of a sudden, Auberon’s head went sharply
round like a terrier’s when it hears a new sound. He half
rose and gazed down the stream.

i88 ROUGH JUSTICE

Victor dreamily marked Auberon’s movement and drew
it, too, into a place in his visual fantasy. “ Both of you
gazing out, over rivers and a fair champaign, at quarries
from which you were digged.”

“ See! ” Civil man as he was, Auberon had to interrupt,
really. He pointed down-stream. “ A heron 1 F eeding !
From Penn Ponds. They fly over Richmond, high up.
But why the deuce at this hour? It’s like having dinner at
three. See him? Wading. Off Misery Spit.”

But Victor’s head would not turn round to see the motion-
less fisher knee-deep in the stream. “Misery Spit!” he
exclaimed softly, “ you know every last touch of paint in
this presentable landscape? By name? ”

“Good Lord, no,” said Auberon. “Quick! he’s going.”

Victor made no -move. The big heron lifted itself, as if
drawn straight up from the ground by a string from above,
and winged slowly away for its distant home wood. The
pomp in the west had grown richer now; its level glow
burnished Auberon’s face as he gazed into it; brown eyes,
brown hair, brown skin — with this aureate benediction upon
them he looked quite a respectable emblem of the brown
goodness of harvest, its ripe nuts, apples and corn. “ Vick! ”
he said, after mature consideration of the western sky.

“ Thy servant listens,” the higher being replied.

“ The sun,” said Auberon, ‘‘ seems to know a good place
when he’s got it.” ••

“ Meaning ? ” Victor enduringly asked.

“ He hasn’t budged an inch, for half an hour.”

“ ‘ Time,’ ” Victor quoted, “ ‘ travels in divers paces with
divers persons.’ ” He looked at Auberon with a touch of
comic despair. Would Bron recognise the quotation? No,
Bron never did recognise quotations. What good would it
be to goon and chaflF this unlettered parson of to-morrow about
the slow ambling of time with “ priests that lack Latin.”

BOOK FIVE 189

Thus is a man’s good wit cramped hy the sorry wits of his
hearer. But Victor was quite patienr about it.

Auberon went on gazing as due we tward as a doating sun-
flower till a tall fir-tree’s topmost smud ;e of black impressionist
brush-work began to infringe at last on the rim of the sun.
The horizontal light was now peering nto mysterious hollows
and chinks that had been dark at mid ay, among the western
boughs of trees. But warmth was nor stinted yet; the old fire
maintained its aspect of immemorial jind secure benignity.

“ Care for another knock-up? ” Auberon asked. Three
racquets lay about on the grass, among tumbled cushions and
pipes and used tea-things.

“ I am too busy,” said Victor, “ eating the lotus.”

A dove cooing louder than usual blurred the last word
for Auberon’s illiterate ear. He made a great joke, for him.
“ Locusts? ” he said. “ Good work! Old Pharaoh ought
to have found you a job.”

“ He might, with less delay, have employed John the
Baptist, a specialist on that diet. No, Goodman, the lotus,
the lotus.” Softly did Victor upbraid the dunce. Then he
let fall with a mellifluous languor the lines of the drugging
lullaby:

We have had enough of action, and of motion we;

Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind.

In the hollow Lotus-land to live and lie reclined
On the hills like gods together, careless of mankind.

For they lie beside their nectar, and the bolts are hurled
Far below them in the valleys, and the clouds are lightly curled
Round their golden houses, girdled with the gleaming world.
Where they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands.

Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery
sands,

Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and praying
hands.

190 ROUGH JUSTICE

Auberon listened intently, his eyes widening. “ Some
poem, that! ” he said at the end. Any decent poetry
spoken aloud by some one he liked, would always work on
him. Victor smiled: it was comic, almost touching, to see
how Bron’s ingenuous thoughts would fumble or plunge
about visibly under the skin of his face, like live pups in a
brown canvas bag.

Bron had grown restless; some unsettling thought
levered him up on his feet. “ Where the deuce is Molly? ’’
he wondered aloud.

“ At the Channings’, I darkly suspect.” Victor was
tranquil as ever.

Auberon took in the idea. “ That’s right,” he said. “ At
the ’phone.” Thomas Garth had kept out of his house
that instrument of. modern unreserve. But Molly, in ex-
treme cases, would borrow the use of it from a neighbour.

“This insatiate craving for news!” Victor murmured.
“ About the little breeze with the Germans, no doubt.”
While expectation of war had been convulsing the vulgar,
Victor had smiled at it; wars never came, he told Molly
and Auberon — only tall talk from politicians about them;
everything was patched up somehow, at the last moment, in
these patched-up and patching times.

Auberon’s thoughts continued to work as visibly as a
spaniel’s. A very sympathetic person might have seen him
pass through the reflection “ Why the deuce didn’t I twig in
time and do it for her? ” to “ Odd if old Vick twigged it,
and yet didn’t go,” and on to “ Vick’s all right, though, all
the same.”

Ill

The whole of that day had been still, and yet some reserves
of stillness had been kept in hand for the evening. Now
evening was bringing them up: she opened out plane beyond
plane of the clear depths of soundlessness; hearing lost itself

BOOK FIVE

191

in them. Victor approved: nature vas making an honest
attempt to come up to Wordsworth’s vision of a nun-like
vesper quietude; the lingering sun, glazed as tight as an
eye full of dreams, was a quite passable Turner. But
Auberon was perturbed; old Bron, as Victor noticed for the
hundredth time — always with a touch of intelligent amuse-
ment — was really like primitive man, or a horse, in face of
anything unusual going on in the sky. The taut, precarious
tensity of the silence seemed to mak>^ his ears prick, as if
some instinct in him divined that this overstrained hush was
infested with something that must be minded.

How do approaching sounds do it? While still out of
range of the ear, do they traverse inner halls and outer halls
and room after room of the vacant mansion of silence before
they open its door and come out to you? It seemed as if at
this moment there slipped across the outer edge of the circle
of stillness surrounding Auberon and Victor an infinitesimal
noise of rubbing. It swiftly cleared and took form as the
rub and faint whine of the sole of a tennis-shoe pressed on a
parquet floor by a quick walker. Before Victor had made
out that much, Auberon spun round to look at the house
and let go the word “ Molly! ”

The rapid steps within the house were now slowing down.
For a few moments they stopped. That was strange. Why
should Molly, the most direct and forthright of persons,
linger? But she did not linger long. Through a shadowy
room and out into the level sunlight, the whitening figure
emerged into distinctness as a swimmer comes up from a
dive.

Auberon had no tail to wag; still he looked, for the
moment, drolly like a large dog whose master, now return-
ing, has been away from him quite long enough. Victor,
half-raised on one elbow, viewed his betrothed with com-
posure, but still with sincere contentment- Yes — vera

192 ROUGH JUSTICE

incessu fatuit dea\ strong as it was, the expert critic felt he
could fairly apply that half-line to Molly just then, Molly
the white-shod and white-robed and.white-souled, “ divinely
tall and most divinely fair.” Her face, with its upper half
in shadow under a wide, floppy Panama hat, was animated
and troubled; all the brave red of each cheek seemed to
have huddled together into its centre; encircled by a be-
leaguering whiteness; her lips had the hurt beauty of ruffled
roses; and her eyes, with the shining black of the pupils
enlarged and almost ousting the brown, had gleams like dark
water moving far down between walls.

But, whatever her agitation, she spoke up like one who
had bidden that tempter, sloppy emotion, get him behind her.
Molly play-acted stoutly. She made and lifted a little
horizontal fold in the front of her white skirt and said, with
an air, “ I carry here in my robe peace and war. Choose
which ye will.”

“Peace, by God!” Auberon mumbled, his eyes on the
torment half-hidden in her face. The towns and ships of
Victor’s poetry were still flaming and sinking rendingly in
his heart.

Molly viewed him gravely and then turned to Victor.
“ Now you! ” she challenged.

Victor was not rent; he was calm; he could remember
the cue. “Nay,” he said; then he waited a moment, to
hold her posed just as she was, in her tall animated beauty,
for him to appraise, before he said lightly: “ Nay, give us
that which you will.”

“ Take war, then ! ” With a brave little flourish she let
the white fold fall. “ To-night! at midnight it begins.”
She turned away from them suddenly. “ Oh ! the dew on
my racquet! ” she cried. She walked a few feet, picked
a racquet up from the grass and stood with her back to them,
wiping its strings, still dry and warm with the unset sun.

BOOK FIVK

193

Auberon’s eyes followed her, dog-1 ke, close at her heels.
When she turned again he had taken his own hanky out
and was carefully wiping the bone-dry gut of his own racquet,
as if there were need. She was conta ned when she rejoined
them, and yet a little different. Her eyes took them both
in at once, like a mothering arm roui d two babies. For all
her Hebe-like splendour of youth, si e had at that moment
the look of a being who, in a way, is always older and wiser
than man, since she always feels, whe 1 a man is endangered,
how short a time it is since he was crawling and crowing
on nursery floors, guarded by women from falling into
the fire.

“ Well, that does it,” Auberon ruefully said. Then he
pondered further and added, as dolefully, “ That puts the
lid on.”

Victor smiled at the comic insufficiency of the words.
“ Young England,” he murmured, “ greets Armageddon.”
His own salute to the grand deluge was almost ready now.
You must have seen what occurs as soon as a monstrous
blue-bottle comes blundering and smashing into a competent
spider’s delicate web. Not for long is the cool-witted owner
stunned by the shock. As promptly as the spider the wits
of Victor were now turning out to do the right thing by
the hulking brute of a fact that had just come butting into
his nicely ordered world — to wind webby bands of appro-
priate phrasing about and about it; to tie it cannily down into
harmlessness.

You may use words as a means of approach to life’s burn-
ing heart; or as sheets of asbestos, fire-proof doors to put
up between you and those central flames. Victor was
always for the asbestos. And now he excelled himself. He
was first-rate. He poetised the smash till Auberon could
scarcely regret it any longer. He blew silvery bugles of
speech that turned the whole thing into high romance. Our

0

194 ROUGH JUSTICE

poor little kicked ant-heap of a world took on, while Victor
spoke, an epic grandeur. Stunned! No, no! Rather had
we come to ourselves after long years of stupor. Greatness
had found us out; we were cast, beyond all previous hope,
for glorious parts, a superb adventure; at last the dazzling
chance had come to us again, in a dull world, to take the
leap of an exalted fate. Oh, Victor did it well.

His looks helped out the stirring effect. They authentic-
ated all that he had said. When Victor was enlivened by
saying fine things, a kind of effluent aura of handsome
animation seemed to disengage itself from him and radiate
round his head. And whenever this candle was lit in the
comely lamp, Molly and Auberon could only glance, now
and then, at each other’s admiring eyes and tacitly swear a
joint fealty. Here- was great leadership; here was a tongue
that could tell you just what you were feeling, before you
knew that you had felt it; here was a captaining mind^
moving far ahead of both of theirs; Victor, they felt, had
faced everything; while he spoke they were like people who
wake on a gashed liner in the Atlantic at midnight, to find
the commander walking the bridge, all debonair, his plans
made, his whole bearing and voice a reassurance and stay,
amidst shaken certainties and under falling skies. The two
humbler spirits glanced at each other, renewing tacitly their
old vows of allegiance.

They were so much moved that at last they had to flop
into bathos. When Victor had spoken splendidly for a
while, Molly looked at the watch on her wrist. “ Golly! ”
she said; “ time to bolt. There are those people coming to
dinner.”

“ ril let the net down,” said Auberon. He paternally
waved the other two away to the house.

BOOK FIVE

195

IV

Bert, being wise for his years, w ^s head gardener now,
and his last job each evening was t ) go down to a juicy
river meadow beyond the garden a id bring back to her
night quarters the old white pony, o . whose back Auberon
and Molly had first learned to ride. Five minutes ago Bert
had passed the lawn, on this errai d. From somewhere
down in the moistening grass of tl* e meadow his tuneful
whistling was now audible — very co« >1, liquid and blithe, as
whistling sounds in a fine summer twilight after good days
of sweat.

Auberon went towards the sound. He met Bert at the
opened meadow gate, bringing Jessie along in a kind of
embrace, her neck lightly folded under one of his arms.
Bert’s tuneful whistling ceased. The two young men
talked gravely, minute by minute, the old pony shaking her
head sharply round now and again and giving little petulant
stamps with a forefoot; why should her two closest friends
be keeping her from her bed? Once, while they were thus
talking, Auberon irrelevantly stooped and kissed the little
central whirl of hair on the pony’s browj as a child he had
had a trick of kissing any beast that he met, and these
caresses had cost him one or two bites; they had also drawn
miracles of forbearance from cur dogs in the streets and from
nursing mothers of blind kittens.

The strain on Jessie’s patience ended at last. The
conference broke up and Bert was lifting a hand towards
his cap when Auberon checked it and they shook hands
shyly and warmly. Bert passed on to the stables, almost
hurried out of a walk by Jessie’s little, short-stepped, eager
half-trot. His melodious whistle did not pipe up again.

To reach the house, Auberon coasted slowly along two
sides of the lawn, where flower-beds lay. At one, in which

196 ROUGH JUSTICE

a certain kind of dark red rose had always grown, he stooped
to smell one bloom after another, taking in long, deep
draughts of the scent, and then holding off to look again at
the bloom and smiling a little. Out of this doating he was
roused by the voice of Colin March singing at him comically
from an open window:

If this young man contents himself with a floral meal too
pure for me,

Why, what a very pure young man this pure young
man must be! ”

Colin there already! By Jove, yes, it was dinner-time.
Auberon fled in to dress, ventre-a-terre.

As he vanished into the house a faint stir of air, the first
of that day, made the garden trees rustle a little, as audiences
do at a play when some strain of attention has just ended

CHAPTER XV

I

C OLIN had brought his me ther to dine with the
Garths, and Claude had bro«.ght his. Claude, now
on convalescent leave after measles, looked in-
expressibly pink in the new skin cor ferred by that malady,
and his pale blue eyes, which stil expressed little, did it
to-night with more than their ordinarv solemnity. “ Claude
is like a pyramid,” Colin once said, “ with a mouse buried
in its innards. He’s one mass of containment, with nil to
contain.”

The Barbason dowager was in her glory to-night. The
fumes of war were well up in her head; her heels — to speak
in a figure — were flying in the air. She positively shouted
about all the good things that the war would bring back to
old England — the social health, the true British grit, the
discipline of the nation. Had she not always predicted these
blessings.? — she appealed to her host. Had she not said,
hundreds of times, that a war would teach “ Labour ” its
place.? She spoke as if the predicted crop were already
lying about on the dining - room floor and impostors
were trying to steal it from her, the one prescient
sower.

Oh yes. Garth reassured her. All her prophecies were
on record. And then the prophetess explained how she
had come to be so right. Mere common sense, she said;
nothing more — merely using her eyes. “ You see, a war
is a pretty hard fact. No voting an enemy down. No
good going on strike against him. All these mobs of ours
will soon find their level, once they come under fire. Thank
God, we’ll have the nation’s real leaders leading again.”
She looked round the table. Her look defied contradiction.
“ They do tell me,” Colin began, with a fine thoughtful

197

198 ROUGH JUSTICE

air, “ that it’s all natural leadership in the field — first an
officer leads if he can, and then ”

“ ‘ If! ’ ” Mrs. Barbason snorted.

Colin’s eye rested demurely on Claude. “ Oh, of course,
the born leader of men ”

“ Isn’t every one of our class born to lead men? ” the
lady demanded.

“ And what of my poor class? ” Victor let himself
murmur. His own good taste condemned Colin for poking
open fun at female guys. That was cheap; it was the
raffish March touch. Still, this woman’s bawling about
“ our ” class was a little too much, anyhow in this house.
When Garths were setting up kings, or pulling them off
thrones, tow-headed Barbasons were, no doubt, herding
swine by the Elbe. .

My dear Victor,” the widow rejoined robustly, “ don’t
interrupt your inferiors. We know you’re leagues above all
us gaping rustics. Don’t rub it in.” She turned to Garth,
on her right. “ Talk to Lucy,” she trumpeted, “ while I
collect myself and eat my dinner. I’m out of breath with
being buffeted by these young bloods.”

Lucy was Lady Wynnant, now on Garth’s right. She
instantly fell to, on her adult life’s task of filling in the
conversational crevices left between the pronouncements of
more pushing talkers. “ You do believe we’ll pull through,
don’t you, Tom? ” she bleated wearily to Garth.

“ That’s just,” he replied, “ what I asked our old ferry-
man, Brench, an hour ago, when he sculled me across.
Brench is England, really — more nearly England than any
one else that I know. He said ‘ We got to.’ ”

That’s it. Sir,” Auberon let the words go, like a held
breath, before bethinking himself not to lay down the
law, with all these fine strong minds about, to do it better
than he.

BOOK FIVK

199

Molly threw him a quick look and nod of assent So did
his father, before going on, to Lady Wynnant, “ Of course
you might say that Napoleon had ‘ got to,’ before Waterloo.”

Mrs. Barbason had recovered her wind. “ No upstart
has got to,” she ruled. “ Defeat is his mStier, Not that
we’ve much to boast of — letting pun) thrusters like Asquith
play the deuce with the land and the Church and the Lords
and the Army and Ulster.”

She paused, and the wan peeress wailed, just to fill in the
chink in the talk: “ Yes, yes, there ^ as been weakness.”

“ Worse,” Mrs. Barbason boomed. “ Think of that
dastard Haldane! ”

“Oh! oh!” Garth murmured, in mock- Parliamentary
protest, “ Haldane thinks how to win wars. If we get an
army over to France in time to do any good, it’s he will
have done it, more than any one else.”

Mrs. Barbason’s face assumed much the same look of
despair as Garth’s proceedings had brought now and again
into the faces of his party chiefs in old days. Yet he was
awesome to face, “ I’d sooner trust,” was all that Mrs
Barbason dared to say, “ the God of Battles than that man.”

II

Massed on Molly’s right and left, at the other end of the
table, the four young men sat, for the most part, silent in
the shadow of their elders’ conversation. Auberon’s face
was full of serious attention, like Molly’s; Claude’s was null
and void; Victor’s was contained and seemed to reserve
judgment; Colin’s twinkled impishly — once or twice his
amused eyes sought Victor’s, during the Barbason’s har-
angues, but Victor was not communing with any Colins
just now; Colin was not quite the thing, except, of course,
in smoking-rooms or after the women were gone. That
raffish March touch!

200

ROUGH JUSTICE

The little snub would not pain Colin, I fancy. Was not
Victor’s Olympian reserve one human absurdity more, to
enjoy? Quite a dainty one, too — more delicately flavoured
than the grotesqueness of Claude, now raising a solemn voice
in the chilled silence left by Garth’s failure to strike the
right note. “ What I want to know,” Claude asked, “ is —
what are we going to get by this war? When it’s over,
you know. Of course there’s all this saving of France and

civilisation et cetera. But, seriously ? When we get

down to business ? What’s it to be? Heligoland back

again? Or a few German colonies? What do we get} ”

“ Oh, I suppose,” Victor purred, “ the same as we get
from anything else — ^just the feel of it. What the wasps
get when you poke a stick into their nest. Thrills, you
know. Harps in . the air. Vibrations. Escape from
eventlessness.”

“ The event’s there, right enough,” Claude grunted. He
hated this cobwebby stuff that Victor would sometimes spin
round him.

“Yes, but are z<;^? ” Victor suavely persisted. “Our
retinas well polished up, for taking impressions? Ear-drums
properly tightened to hear the harps in their pianissimo
passages? All of us quite equipped as we should be to take
in the savour of any strange thing that may come? ”

Victor spoke slowly, lazily teasing the poor pink materialist,
as it were, with tickling blades of long grass. Auberon knew
it was only Vick’s fun, but weak good-nature sent Auberon
floundering in to the victim’s relief. “ Not much catch,”
he said, “ in taking in the savour of a licking.”

“ Oh ! my dear Bron ! ” Victor sweetly upbraided. “ Not
see how fine a storm is? Draw in our feelers, like snails,
the moment they touch something splendidly hard? ”

Lady Wynnant hardly ever said things for any interest
they had of their own. She said them to caulk conversa-

BOOK FIVE

201

tional holes, or to change the bo^^ling. “There’s one
thing,” she mournfully said, when she saw that the gravelled
Claude stood in need of a diversion “ The Navy is all
right.”

Garth began to measure out as miich assent as his inner
knowledge would permit. “It has rrvinners,” he said. “ I
believe it has discipline too, except among some of the
admirals.”

“It has ships,” Mrs. Barbason bo )med in, “in spite of
the Radicals.”

“ The right ships? ” Garth asked. “ Or only the ones
the Press screamed for? Of course I don’t know about
navies.”

He knew enough — if others could know it too — to reduce
to whimpers of terror that confident buzz of “ The Navy’s
all right, anyhow,” which went rustling round the British
Empire that night. He all but knew what must come —
the vaunted super-ships in flight from the besetting enemy
sharks — bundled away into secret sea-lochs, defenceless if the
enemy’s blundering scouts should ever get the use of their
eyes. He knew enough, too, to picture the scene going on
in the War Office to-night — the wild rush for every good
job on the staffs of higher commands, the pulling of wires
and the mobilising of influential friends, some of them
women. Still, he felt, quite sincerely, “ What do I know? ”
— like Montaigne, who knew more than most.

A jar may hold water well and yet may convey — perhaps
by some faint darkening of its exterior — the fact that there
is a liquid in it. Garth made no revelations by anything
that he said now, and yet a formidable significance disengaged
itself from him. He did not pour it out; it perspired through
the glaze of his reserve.

To the nurslings of fortune who listened to him to-night,
war had meant little more than one of the meets that had

202

ROUGH JUSTICE

been arranged now and then for our army to hunt parties of
troublesome “ natives ” — ^at most a band of embattled Dutch
farmers. Seldom, within the memory of the middle-aged,
had a thousand English been killed in one battle — and then
it had seemed almost outrageous, as if foxes had taken to
biting masters of hounds. The real thing, the grand hazard
and test, with everything in the pool, had been for our
dwarf enemies only; ours was the milder experience of little
princes playing in gentle games of football got up for them
always to win.

Garth’s actual words do not matter. Something not the
words, some subtler emanation that he shed round him,
worked like the kind of rain which seems to wash the air
and gives almost morbid visibility to distant points in a land-
scape. With that rare and arresting clarity some of the perils
of our State were beginning to emerge when Mrs. Barbason
struck in firmly to restore the event of the day to its proper
place as a new incident in the old party squabbles that she
loved. “ You bet your boots,” she counselled, “ Lloyd
George’s Budget encouraged the Germans to this. And
that man Redmond comes in somewhere, too. All the pack
of them. Yes, my dear.” The three last words were said
to Molly, now shyly trying to catch the two elder women’s
eyes, for the departure.

Both Colin and Victor, each in his way, could enjoy the
courteous gravity with which the three Garths, each in his
or her manner, listened to the good woman’s tirades

III

“ Well, I suppose,” said Claude, when the women were
gone and the four younger men had closed up towards the
host’s end of the table, “ they’ll be mobilisin’ the Ter-ry-tor-
yul Army.” He drawled the two last words with a facetious
imitation of a Cockney twang. Two Regular officers had

BOOK FIVE

203

lately been making a little money by c.rawling them thus in
the refrain of a song that they sang at ^he music-halls.

Garth replied pretty drily: “ That is the idea, I fancy.”
Absurd women were one thing; any rasping false note from
a man was another.

Claude perceived no rebuke. “ guard a canal in the
Midlands? ” he said in a tone of ostentatious lack of interest
in these scarcely military affairs.

“ Or in Egypt,” said Garth. “ Or in Flanders.” After
each suggestion he searched Claude’s vacuous face for some
ray of intelligence.

None appeared. “ Bit of a risk. Sir — wouldn’t it be? ”
was all that Claude said.

Auberon listened intently, wanting to know; Colin with
eyes cast down lest they should betray his gay enjoyment;
Victor, perhaps, with some sensation more mellow. Each
of us carries about, I suppose, his own set of X-rays or Y-
rays or whatever his special illuminant is: one set, it seems,
will pierce through everything else and show only what is
sound in the people it plays on; another set will ignore all
the rest of the structure of these objects and fasten upon
their comic ingredients alone; a third set may pass un-
observantly through both of these components and fix ex-
clusively on something else — perhaps on the way the creatures
live most of their time like deserted children, shut up alone
with fears of things that will never happen and great plans
which will not come to pass. Victor had no rays that would
go very deep, but his had a great knack of showing him the
outsides of fine things, the bloom on the face of spirited
actions, the lustre and choice glaze of the surfaces of virtues
and traditions. And now the connoisseur in him was sooth-
ingly fed.

The hour was kindly: it hung ripe and soft like a fruit;
and every one had been decently good in his part — for these

204 ROUGH JUSTICE

poor times; even the mountebank Colin had been less jarring
than sometimes. As to Garth — what an Old Gaunt he
was! A genuine piece of the most austere carving in oak!
Why, the old Spartan had almost done the impossible —
scared Mrs. Barbason out of her stuffy obsession of spites.
And then how divertingly had those darling rancours of hers
crept back and refilled her soul, like the muddy water that
children try to sweep out of a puddle with brooms; it comes
draining back. Molly and Auberon too, the well-bred
worthies, making no show among parrots and monkeys, but
still somehow right, with their low-toned lustre of gentle
race worn unconsciously and humbly — Molly especially,
Molly all flushed and troubled, with dark fires alight in her
eyes when her father had talked like the Last Trump, as if
the war were lost or won already, according to what we had
done or not done long ago, and she had broken out with
“ Oh, Father, it can’t be so past-tensey yet. Can’t people
who’re drowning be saved, whatever they’ve done, if other
people have courage.? ” And Claude, our droll shield and
defender, Bellona’s pink bridegroom, the kind of brain we
were putting against the prize pupils of Moltke and Clause-
witz. All these had something of colour or vehemence.

The scene was good enough, too ; it had composure and
glow; the honest, attentive Garth faces darkling down from
the walls, the paint of them sombre with age and yet con-
tainedly animated with all the light that it had drunk in
during the centuries; the big embayed French window
faintly luminous still, and, visible through its uncurtained
panes, a last russet flush still warm in the north-west; and
the river, far down in its bed, shimmering with reflections
of starlight. All like some play of fair quality, for the
period, acted in front of a handsome back-cloth of old
tapestry, with the sheen of romantic mail armour glimmering
through some green forest gloom.

BOOK FIVK

205

Victor felt no fear. New Year’s Day might find English-
men ranging along with Arabs and Sj aniards and Greeks in
that queer outer darkness inhabited b - losers of old empires.
Victor had said so himself, just before dinner, to the intensely
listening Auberon and Molly. But it was only so in a
sense, a figurative, literary sense, as y u might speak of that
future New Zealander musing over the bones of a dead
London. When had national danger, defeat and decay not
been spoken and sung of, well or ill, by eloquent or windy
persons? But miracles did not happen scares and vicissitudes
came, but each time the “ practical ” pt ople bungled their way
through, and the people of finer mind viewed each mess, as
it was made and swept away in its turn, with the appropriate,
unexaggerated emotion: but no miracle really happened;
our world, apart from these redeeming efforts at comedy,
was too prosaic even to tumble to pieces. So Victor felt no
fear. The film that intervened between him and the
shuddersome touch of things as they are was still whole and
untorn; he could not even see, with any energy of vision,
that Thomas and Molly and Auberon Garth were in the
throes.

IV

The men did not sit long. When they rose, Auberon
slipped across to open the bayed French window; he stood
looking out from its threshold. “ Taking a squint while we
can,” he muttered apologetically, on finding that Victor had
come too and was eyeing him quizzingly. “ It’s flood,”
Auberon added, seemingly with deep joy in that periodic
process of nature’s.

“ Flood ? ” said Victor.

A waterman’s word,” Auberon answered. “ It means
a new tide, only just beginning to make.” He spoke
almost shamefastly. Lore that you privately love may seem
childishly homely when hauled out for the wise to inspect

2o6

ROUGH JUSTICE

“You feline Argus!” Victor gently exclaimed, “how
can you tell, in the dark? ”

“ By the way the shine from the stars lies on the water.
You see, the stream and the new tide are meeting. They
jostle each other, to try to get past. So some little bits of
the shiny water run up stream and others run down, and
the shininess moves with ’em. In ten minutes or so the
twinkling will all strike up river.”

Victor was scarcely attending. He drifted out after the
others. Auberon lingered a few minutes more to doat on
those shifting and trickling patterns of silvery light bespang-
ling the black waters. “ Good old flood! ” he muttered to
himself, brooding and doating.

CHAPTER XVI

I

T he little party broke up eariy: that night a meal
could just hold people togcth'T, but after the last
mouthful no one could sit till and talk. The
purposeful people found things to do; the rest could at any
rate throw the common routine of th» ir lives into confusion
and give themselves the sensation of 1 ving at high pressure,
hustled by mighty events.

Lady Wynnant and Colin had gone; the Barbasons were
getting into their car; Victor was to have stayed the week-
end, but those wayward rushes and swayings of the in-
effectual crowd had involved him too; Joyce had telephoned
from Shiplake, through the Channings, that she “ couldn’t
stand being here, away from everything ” — so she was
motoring straight back to town and begged Victor to come
too. She would call for him at 10.30. So Victor was now
in his room, making ready to go, while Molly and Auberon,
at the front door, watched the Barbason car receding down
the brilliant green tunnel bored by its headlights through the
high shrubs overhanging the drive.

That luminous tube and the black lump which seemed
almost to block it diminished to a bend where tube and all
instantly vanished, leaving behind the thrill of release that
comes when the last cent of a social debt has been dutifully
paid. Then Auberon eagerly slipped his arm under Molly’s,
gave hers a good brotherly hug aguinst his own side and
drew her along by the burrow-like path through the shrubbery
flanking the house, into the open garden beyond, above the
jewelled gloom of the river. JVasn^t he splendid?” he
burst out as they walked. Clearly Auberon had borne
hours of longing for this chance to speak out. “ Simply
tremendous 1 ”

207

208 ROUGH JUSTICE

Of course Molly knew who was meant. “ He,” with
no name mentioned, meant only one person in their talks.
But Victor was now something of hers, and this made her
shy about singing his praise. So she nnade an attempt to do
the light touch : “ Was he dropping pearls,” she said, “ while
you smoked? ”

I don’t mean then. I meant — what he said before
dinner.”

Molly breathed devoutly “Yes.” Of course she had
known what Bron meant. Her feint at the light touch was
ended.

“ Some lead, wasn’t it? ” Auberon said fervently. “ Talk
about pillars of fire! He’s the man to be with in any old
wilderness.”

“Yes, yes!” There was no longer any reserve about
Molly’s Amen. The kind darkness, merciful to intimate
thoughts, set her free to speak from the full heart.

“ The part,” he went on, “ about all of us sticking
together, like people at fires and wrecks.”

“ Yes!” she whispered, “ yes! ”

They were silent, perhaps for a minute. They were
walking along the path nearest to the river. You must
remember that they were very simple people. That any
feeling could fire impassioned and beautiful words and not
also fire their speaker to act in the spirit of those words —
such a notion was beyond them. Auberon pressed Molly’s
arm closer to him. “ You saw what it meant? ” he said,
gently.

“ Y es — he means to turn soldier.” She waited a moment.
“ And you, Bron? ” she asked.

“Sure thing! Vick’s tip will do me. Old Fulford’s
coming too. Look here; I got it just before dinner.” He
lighted a match and showed her a telegram — just “ If
anything doing, let me stand in. Fulford.”

BOOK FIVE

209

There was another pause, their thoughts marching
silently on, to the music of the massed nurmurs and whispers
of the riverain night — little noises o: gulping, kissing and
sucking from the infant tide as it swamped tiny hollows or
scrambled across pebbly flats; the stern roar from the
distant weir; and a few more fortuito ^s sounds — the ringing
tap-tap of a single pair of iron-heele 1 boots traversing the
hushed village; the squeal of a girl mitering late with her
lover under the tow-path trees; then a little burst of singing
from an opened window of the inn —

^ Land of hope and glory.

Mother of the free.

How shall we extol thee
Who are bom of thee! ”

The voices were men’s, but with youth, the ecstatic
and tremulous spirit, a-stir in them still; the notes had the
pitiful beauty of all convivial singing when heard, as a God
might hear it, from some outer darkness where he watches.
The two listened.

“ Brother Bert will be there,” Auberon said. “ He’s in
with us, too.”

“ As an officer? ”

“ No. All of us privates — wasn’t Vick clear on that? —
what he said about nobody fussing about his rank at a wreck
or a fire? He all but said, ‘ I’m enlisting, and won’t you
come too? ’ ”

Molly saw it all now. “ Yes,” she agreed. “ And you
got Bert to go also? You have been quick.”

“ It seemed scrubby to have such a tip and not share
with Bert. He was always a good old ally — d’you re-
member? ”

“ I’m remembering everything, Bronkin. Oh ! here he

p

210

ROUGH JUSTICE

n

Across the lawn from the house there was approaching
the alternately rising and sinking glow of a cigarette puffed
rhythmically by some invisible mouth. “ ‘ In such a night
did Thisbe fearfully o’ertrip the dew.’ Heavy dew too!”
In the warm darkness Victor’s voice made the delicate plash
of a slender fountain jetting high in a still courtyard. He
stooped to feel how wet his shoe was.

Molly ran to tug at his arm, to get him aside, away even
from Bron: was he not going away in ten minutes — for
ever, perhaps? When she had him alone she broke out,
“ I’m glad — nothing but glad — not afraid — only glad.”

He looked down at her, questioning her upturned face.
Molly had broken out before now in cries of passionate
humility at the thought of having gained his love. At one
of these times she had made him think of a pre-Raphaelite
Annunciation, with its beautiful Virgin bowed under the
sense of her glorious and unheard-of fate. Victor knew
how to appraise such homage. It was a thing choice of its
kind, like the August moon now rising and the changeful
sheen of the mailed river and the elfin antics of the bats
looping and twirling above and about, now lost upon a
black background of shrubs and then rising clear to trace
queer arabesques on the sky. But what, in particular, could
be moving her now? “ I am glad, too,” he said, with just
a seemly infusion of lover-like ardour.

She pulled at his arm. “ Don’t keep me out of your
plans,” she begged with a fond importunacy.

“ Plans? ” he said, very slowly, groping for some clue to
this odd agitation of hers. His cool hand patted the hot
and moist one that lay along his sleeve, with its fingers
clasping a little at the cloth, as a bird’s feet embrace the thing
they rest on.

BOOK FIVE

211

“Oh, don’t!” she appealed. “You keep me standing
outside.” Then she changed her tone quickly, to show
him how bravely light she could be. “ Well, and when do
you ride away to the wars, you two soldiers? to-morrow? ”

“To-morrow! ” he echoed hollowly. The word was a
mere articulate gasp of dismay, and yet perhaps it was just
within the power of fantastic genero ity to construe it as the
affirmative answer that would have been made by any of
those who do not blow on a trumps t unless they are ready
to fight with a sword.

For some moments Molly was perfectly silent. Then
she spoke with her voice under perfect control. “ Bron
understood, at once, what you meant — before dinner. I
didn’t, at first — the part about your enlisting and not being
an officer.”

They walked on in silence for some moments more.
Molly’s hand, the one that had grasped a little at the surface
of Victor’s sleeve, lay motionless on it. And Victor, no
doubt, had something to do — some thinking and piecing
together, and some deciding. Enlist! Private soldier!
What had all this staple stuff of melodrama to do with him?
Oh, these Garths, these primitive, pragmatic Garths who
could never hear a thing said without asking, “ What does
that lead to, in action? What must be done} ” As if to do
this and to do that were life’s whole purpose, and perfect
spectatorship were nothing!

And yet, how resist? Brute circumstance could not always
be ruled by the wise. A current had set in; it had caught
him; a turned tide was taking him swiftly along. And the
art of life had this, too, for a part of itself — to know when to
give in, with a good grace, to currents too strong to be
stemmed — not to strive or cry but to modulate yourself
deftly from key into key; and always, always, to get your
intonation ringingly right at the present time, whatever

212

ROUGH JUSTICE

might come of it. Besides, if he should say to Molly, “ Oh,
I was only just talking,” what would he see in her face
when they went into the house? The light utterly out in
that beautiful censer which she had lit in his honour? That
was not to be risked; better face anything future than that
instant loss.

Silent still, they drew near to where Auberon sat on the
low river wall. “ Well, Bron,” said Victor, with nearly all
the serenity back in his voice. “ Shall we e’en take the
shilling to-morrow? ”

Auberon humbly followed the lead. “ A bob’s always
useful,” he said.

And then, while they waited for Joyce’s coming, Victor
did justice to the occasion; he took light; he ran on; he
met like a prince the demands of the case for words taste-
fully chosen. Auberon felt his own. thoughts flowing clear
in Victor’s words; his own inarticulate impulse not to sit
still under this collapsing sky, but to jump up and rush for
something to do, and some one to do it with, took proper
form with Victor there to phrase it. Molly was dead
silent, dead still, except when she put up a hand to brush
away from her face the webby tickle of the dew Victor
had reached the very top of his form when they heard the
peremptory horn of the expected car as it felt its way
audibly down the embowered lane from the Great West
Road to the house.

A maid came wading across the wet lawn, as it were
upon stilts. Miss Nevin, she said, would not come in — she
would wait in the car.

Auberon said, “ I’ll pay Joyce our respects,” to give Vick
and Molly their minute alone; they would not want him;
they had one another: theirs was a garden enclosed and his
place was outside its high walls. With the ache of that
feeling there came a curious assuagement; not an anodyne;

BOOK FIVE

just the reverse — a heightened awareness of everything
around him, just as it was, and deli ious simply because it
was just what it was. Above the t jnnelsome path, as he
went round the flank of the house, i)e could just make out
the line of a certain branch of an old walnut-tree. On
it he had often sat when a boy, and now his old delight in
the feel of its bark and in the angle t made with the trunk
and the way that it dipped, farther out, and then lifted
again, like a saddle, flooded back mto him now; it was
enough for things to be simply themselves and for you to
be you and to have known them; then they were utterly
lovable.

As he rounded the house to its front his eyes flinched
before the great car’s blazing lights. Even Victor had been
slightly apologetic at first about the glories of that equipage
of his people’s; Colin said it invited the social revolution.
But nothing was ugly to-night; not even showing-off or
snobbishness; everything would be touching and pitiful if
we could only see right into its timid and anxious little heart
— really no worse than a small foolish child’s.

With the glare still stupefying his eyes, Auberon could
not have told at first that it was Joyce who sat withdrawn
in the distant corner of the closed car. He made out a
white shoe on the floor; above it, something rustled slightly
— the rub of silk against silk; some jewel gleamed off and
on; nothing more could he see, and perhaps the imperson-
ality of a person who had to be thus inferred from scanty
circumstantial evidence made his voice a shade less friendly
than was its wont.

For Joyce broke out amazingly: “ Why do you hate me
so? ” cutting short his courtesies. Joyce seemed to flame
at him suddenly out of the darkness, with burning eyes, and
no face visible round them, like a dog’s eyes when it lies awake
in a dark room: “ As if I were some strange woman you

214 ROUGH JUSTICE

had to be civil to! Oh! I suppose it’s the horrible pride
you keep at the back of all your meek ways — you make
people like you and want to be friends and help you, and
then you — you show them the door.”

“ I’m frightfully sorry, Joycie,” was all he could say, in
his first consternation. He rummaged hurriedly through
the drawers of his mind for some clue to Joyce’s irritability.
Why, of course — what a blind pig he was! Vick must
have told her everything on the ’phone and she was upset
and fretting for Vick. Well, it was natural. “ Vick has
been fine to-night,” he said warmly.

“Oh, Vick, Vick, always Vick!” She shook the name
off.

Auberon sagely recalled things he had heard about the
indirectness of women. Of course she was worried for Vick.
He went on: “ He was tremendous. He showed us all how.
He’s fetching us all away to the war.”

She leant forward. “ You? ” she said.

“ And Bert. You remember * friend Bert, in our
garden? ”

“ Oh, Bert! ” Again, the name was brushed off like a
fly.

At the top of the broad, shallow steps a little stir was
beginning. The door had opened: a shaft of light was
thrown out; it traversed the gravel and went searching into
the shrubberies beyond. In his wish to placate and comfort,
Auberon had leant forward into the car, resting one hand
on the edge of the seat Joyce sat on. The hand was snatched
up by two hot, ungloved ones. “ I was a beast,” she said,
low and eagerly. “ Wash it all out, Bron — ^all my beastli-
ness. God protect you ! ”

His hand was raised quickly, pressed to a warm cheek,
and laid gently down, and Joyce, the next second, was hailing
Molly and Victor, as they came down the steps, with the

BOOK FIVK

215

hard, bright, educated chaff that w is her usual working
dialect. “ And so

Marlbrouck s’en va-t’en g erre —

Ne sais quand reviendra!

Yes, Bron told me. Mes compliments , Molly. They’ll wear
your colours in their caps, your pit ture in their hearts.”
She kept it up in that vein till the .jreat car took motion
silently like a liner when its time comes to sever many
friends.

Again Molly and Auberon stood watching a car that
threaded its own burrow of light through solid-seeming
verdure. “ Joyce all right? ” he asked, as they turned to
go in.

“ Joyce? ” Molly said. She took nothing in.

“ She didn’t seem very square on her perch ”

‘‘ Who? ”

“Joyce — you know how tremendously all-there she is,
as a rule.”

“ Who? — Joyce? ” Molly came a little way out of her
reverie. “ Joyce? Oh, my dear Bron, can’t you see? ”

No, he couldn’t — so deeply ingrained was his sense of
not coming up to the appointed standards. Nothing had
ever set him on to study the fits and starts and little rushes
hither and thither, in eagerness or pain, that give away the
secret of the female creature when urged by nature to make
some little push to bring off its own hampered choice of a
mate. And Molly had sunk back again into her own reverie
now. She said good-night to him absently, as she went off
to her room and he to knock at the door of his father’s study.

Ill

The elder Garth was bent absorbedly over a letter that he
was writing; when his son entered he looked up as if only

2i6

ROUGH JUSTICE

half roused from thought; each hand kept its place on the
blotter, the pen was lifted only just clear of the paper.

His son was for backing out, at the sight. “ Sorry to
butt in. Sir. You’re busy? ”

“ Not a bit.” The elder leant back in his chair. He
was no longer a man interrupted. No surfeit had ever come
to take the edge off his hunger for talk with his son.

“ Vick told you,” Auberon asked, “ the game we have
on? ”

“ No. But I guessed. He and Molly came to say good-
night a minute ago. She had fear in her face.” For a
moment the two followed their thoughts without speaking,
and then Thomas Garth said, “ Is that it? ” and Auberon
nodded.

“ Are you in it, too? ” his father enquired.

“ D’you mind. Sir? ”

“ Mind! It’s age I mind — years — I never minded them
before. I can’t go with you, Bron.”

‘‘ You’re worth us all, Sir,” Auberon was breaking out,
but old habit put its brake on his tongue, and he was re-
possessed with sureness that all the big things in your heart
can only remain at their best by being unsaid; once uttered,
they have set out on their way to become mere phrases,
the sentimentalist’s soiled current coin.

His father looked glad that he had not gone on. They
stole friendly looks at each other; they reconnoitred each
other’s shy thoughts. Two of these scouting glances
collided and then Auberon made a rush to say something.
** It was all Victor’s idea,” he said.

“ Was it? ” his father said, rather drily, and then paused,
and began again : “ How about Holy Orders? ”

Auberon plunged; “ Would you mind if I chucked the
whole thing? ”

“ Hullo! ”

BOOK FIVK

217

“ It’s like this, Sir, I fancy I do be ieve in a kind of God,
in a sort of a way. Just now and then, anyhow. I get a
feeling that something inside me, or round me, is putting it
to me straight that something has g )t to be done, for no
other reason than just that this power or spirit, whatever it
is, makes me feel it’s the only thin/; in the whole world
that’s really worth doing — ^and then th e thing seems perfectly
easy to do, however scaring and hard it might have seemed
at any other time.”

“ That’s God, all right,” said Thomas Garth.

“ It’s all he runs to, with me. l^hen there’s Christ. I
do believe, Sir, I’ve loved him — of course it’s a big word to
use, but I’ve really loved every Jack thing about him ever
since I first heard of his death and went off and hid in the
rhododendrons to blub. Whatever he said seems to grow
into being a bit of yourself, till you can’t make up your mind
what to do, in anything big, without thinking first, ‘ If I
should do this, would Christ bar me? ’ ”

“ That’s faith, right enough,” said his father,

“ Think so. Sir? It’s all I can get, in that line. As to
a lot of the rest, I can’t even feel that it matters. Fact is,
it seems to let him down — making out, as it were, that all
the lovely, noble things he said wouldn’t count for so much
if he’d been born the usual way and his body had lain still
when he died. What d’you think. Sir? ”

“ That. I’ve thought it these forty years.”

Auberon stared. Was it possible that his father and he
should both have been worrying out the very same things,
each shut up alone in a dark room, and no signals between
them? He warmed to the work and went on: “The jar
is that God seems to me to be up against Christ, in all this
war business. The one thing that I feel to be more worth
doing just now than anything else in the world is for every
soul in this island to stick tight together until we can pull

2i8 rough justice

through this beast of a war. It’s the same kind of sureness
you’d have about what to do when a kiddy falls into the
river. Not reason and proof and all that. Simply sureness.''’

“ Yes.”

“ That’s the God side of it — only it brings you right up
against Christ. I’ve tried all I know and I can’t, for the
life of me, square any sort of a war with what Christ says
about peace.”

“ Nobody can, Bron,” his father said quietly.

Auberon marvelled again. Why on earth had he waited
till now to break through the fence that had kept him away
from this friend who had been having it all out in solitude,
like himself? And now the time was short. He let him-
self go. “No good thinking, is.it, Sir, that Christ was
simply talking through his hat — ^about the other cheek and
not resisting evil and all that? Of course he must have
meant it, mustn’t he? — that we were to let the Germans
walk over us all and do what they like. I’ve tried to make
out that he meant something else, but I felt my mind
becoming slimy directly.”

“ It does,” his father said. “It begins as soon as one
wriggles.”

“ So I’m for denying him, honest, this time and fighting
it out, and then, when we’re out of this hole, we might see
what can be done.” Here a twinge of panic traversed the
man of few words, who had spoken so many. Gassing
away! — horrible thought. There was a note of deflation
in Auberon’s voice as he concluded lamely: “ You see that
I’m a bit of Mr. Facing-both-ways, I’m afraid. Sir.”

That, too, his father understood — the inveterate “ half-
ness ” of life — its refusal to blow perfectly ringing and un-
qualified calls on its bugles. For nineteen years these two
had been mutually receding, till each had become, to the
other, almost an unexplored continent To-night they

BOOK FIVE

219

were making landings, at last, on each other’s unfrequented
shores and finding everything there far liliar beyond expecta-
tion. “That’s how it goes, Bron,’ said Garth. “All
broken lights. Only one thing to d(' — to keep driving at
action — putting out all your strength cri something or other,
not scrubby. It keeps you fit to get the feel of the great
moments. If only we could hold th m when they come!
Why, we could keep the earth warn when the sun had
cooled down.”

Garth’s tone, as he said the last few words, grew lightly
whimsical, shying away, as it were, from eloquence. Auberon
loved that half-humorous way of tailing off into bathos.
To be serious and yet to decline to mount any high horse —
it seemed right and natural.

The elder man shifted his grasp of their only topic away
from the place at which it had grown a little too hot to be
gripped. “ So you don’t altogether hold,” he said, “ with
our friend Clement Wade and his Pacifists.”

“ ’Fraid I don’t know their line. Sir.”

“ Well — Christ’s — in a way. That we ought to love all
mankind too much to fight any part of it — say to the
Germans, ‘Shoot, if you like, but we won’t. You are our
brothers and we aren’t Cains.’ ”

“ Glorious — wouldn’t it be — if only one could? If one
could feel really the same about all the French ies and Germans
and blacks that one hasn’t seen as one feels about the good
old life-like watermen here and the jolly chaffy crowd at
cricket matches! Can any human bring it off. Sir? ”

“What know I? Possibly.” No doubt he thought of
Wade shuddering away from the sight and sound and smell
of an English holiday crowd and yet going through the
motions of hugging all humanity to his heart.

Auberon searched for some moments among the sensations
that he could remember. “ I know 1 can’t,” he then said.

220

ROUGH JUSTICE

“ Nor I/’ said his father. How could that cold abstract
figure of universal love, commended by so many of the most
loveless, make head against the warm affections of kind
common men for people and things that feed their friendly
senses and fill their passionate hearts? But he added:
“ Mind you, it has to come yet — the bigger love, or what-
ever it’s called. It’s no credit to us that it’s not here
already.”

“ That’s right. Sir,” said Bron.

*‘The only question is — what’s the right way to it?
Acting as if it were here already? — when all that we’ve got
to, as yet, is some tepid thinking about it? Or keeping
alive whatever spark of comradeship we have alight among
the people in each country? ”

“ Number two. Sir, for me,” said Auberon, full up to
the brim with a heartening sense of something going on
like a great dawn or a spring-tide of wonderful height — the
swell of a huge, uncritical, unselfish impulse of companion-
ship throughout an endangered nation that braces itself to
hold together, for all it is worth, till it can see its way
through. Thus far had man’s love of man struggled, till
now; it could warm humanity only by sections, as yet, and
that with strange unlovelike conflagrations at times. It
would warm all humanity evenly in the end; but not,
perhaps, if that first, struggling fire were quenched. It
might seem absurd, in a way, and yet it was shiningly clear
to Auberon’s mind — if all the internecine flames that were
blazing up over half Europe to-night could be put utterly
out by one turn of a tap there might be no bead of light
left at all to kindle a friendlier fire at some happier day.

The two could now talk in the shorthand of friends;
thoughts could pass from mind to mind on the wings of
mere snippets of speech. No abruptness of transition
mattered. “ About commissions? ” said Garth.

BOOK FIVI

221

** The point don’t arise,” said Aub<;ron. “ Victor is for
the plain thing. We’ve both always t ut O.T.C.-ing. And
Bert’s coming with us, if you’ll let him off, Sir.”

His father nodded.

“You see, Sir ” said Bron, ard there he pulled up,

flinching back from the edge of verbia ^e.

His father handed him the letter that he had been writing.
“ Anything like that? ” he asked.

While Auberon read, his father b isied his fingers with
other papers, to make time and case for the reader. The
letter was to a fellow-member of the county’s Territorial
Association. Its point was that, now that the Territorials
must become millions, a break should be made with the plan
of taking the well-to-do youth as a God-given officer and
the less well-to-do as a private. This time the thing was
too serious, Garth wrote: we must rake in all the natural
leadership we could find; a real war couldn’t be run on
lines of suburban gentility; better do the sane thing before
we had troops thrown away in the field by leaders who
were leading only because they were able to buy a mess kit.

Auberon read slowly. He relished the curt bareness and
pith of the sentences, each trained fine for its job, with
every fatty word sweated out. “ Good work. Sir,” he said
at the end.

In both of them, at that moment, the risen waters of
reciprocal kindness were pressing hard on closed sluices.
One breath more of strength in some uninvestigated wind of
the spirit and each of them would have owned, somewhat
brokenly, that till now he had never seen the other as he
was. But habit held; the fastidious emotion shrank from
the deflowering of its virginal pride of containment. The
elder man had risen, and there they stood, second by second,
unable either to speak from the heart or to break away from
the sight of one another’s eyes and bring to an end this

222

ROUGH JUSTICE

last possibility of speaking. While they stood silent, a little
clock, with a round handle, that stood on Garth’s desk,
struck the half-hour, muted and small, from some recess in
its vitals. That ended it as decisively as the bell that cuts
short people’s farewells when a ship is sailing.

“ I think that’s about all there is to it. Sir,” Auberon
said, and they bade each other their ineffectual good-night.

IV

Y ou may remember the little notebook that was preserved
by Thomas Garth in a drawer. He took it out as soon as
Auberon left the room — the first time Garth had touched
it since the morning after Follett came to the house. Dust
had settled again on its shiny black cover: when he slapped
it against the edge of the desk, motes flew thick in the lamp-
light The pages were gummed together with old damp
and immobility. He separated them carefully.

Yes, here was the living Bron, the little eager and wonder-
ing delighter in everything that fortune offered him. “ Oh,
Muvva, look! A bee tickling the gwass!” Bron on all-
fours, on the midsummer lawn, wriggling with joy as he
watched a bee walking awkwardly on the tips of the stubby
blades of the mown grass; and Winifred running to look.
Bron dancing in ecstasy round the autumn bonfire of leaves
as it brightened towards evening, and chanting a kind of
rapturous litany as he whirled: “ O, fire burneth well!
Fire burneth better than a lamp, because a lamp isn’t so
good. Fire burneth better than anything else. O fire!”
Then Bron, entranced with admiration of Victor’s talk,
leaving his food uneaten to listen, and saying afterwards,
“ Fahva, the time simply fleds when a person’s listening to
Vick’s compersations.” And then Bron, flown with a
pride that had to find vent, bringing his father a piece of
wood rudely fashioned and saying gravely, “ A weppin I A

BOOK FIVE

223

pistol! Isn’t it deesunt? ” And always at night Bron
tired, not sated, with the day’s adventures, snuggling in to
sleep, with his sunset cry of “ Fun t( -morrow ” and some
gigantic future plan almost visible in his heart. He that
had liked life so much was going to be killed.

Garth had almost no hope. Ou jolly little sporting
wars were over. This would be scit ntific killing, on the
grand scale — a herding of millions of the young of Europe
into model abattoirs, like the pigs at 'he Chicago factories.
He read on. Yes, Bron had courage “Whenever,” one
entry ran, “ Molly jumps over anything in the garden, Bron
says, ‘ Bwon do ut,’ and tries to jump it too, and generally
falls. To-day he tried to jump the low rose-garden railing,
came down and cut his forehead on a broken flower-pot,”
Garth remembered that day, and Winifred holding the
bleeding child in her arms all the time, as if some one were
trying to take him away, till the doctor came to sew up the
gash — holding him and crying secretly above his head while
she told the boy he would have to be brave, because it would
hurt. After the sewing, Bron had seen her crying with
sorriness for him, and then he had said to her, “ Afte wall,
what did the sewing-man do? Had a pencil and dwawed a
cow and a fish for me.”

The words were written in Winifred’s hand; and near
them a note of a folly of Bron’s. Garth had written it
exultantly a week before his wife’s death. “ When I was
on the terrace this evening Bron appeared on high, on the
window-sill of the bath-room. He was in his pyjamas and
roseate after his bath. The scamp just sang out, ‘Catch
me, Fahva,’ when he saw me below, and jumped straight
down the fifteen feet into my arms. It took me all the
cricket I knew to field him. Folly, of course, but still
something like trust in a friend.” And that was the comrade,
Garth thought, that he had been letting go, these nineteen

224

ROUGH JUSTICE

years. A few strangers would have a good chum for some
months, and then an end to it all.

When a friend dies we may see with more than normal
clarity the now irreparable loneliness in which he must have
lived, shut up with his small band of wavering virtues to
stand the siege that is now over. Some such light was now
gaining clearness in Garth while he stood beside the grave
so swiftly dug for his son. How stoutly Bron had tried, in
the early days when his father had known him best, to make
everything out! On almost every page there was a note of
some grave question of his — “ Fahva, is a yard high, or
long.? ” or, on a long walk, “ Fahva, are we nearer home
than we’re not? ” and then, later, “ Fahva, is watching a
kind of small staring? ” And then, somehow, the questions
had come to an end and Bron had been left to feel his own
way — and no doubt had fallen down over and over again as
he thus stumbled along in the dark and picked himself up
as well as he could and stumbled forward again, quite alone.

It was not in the nature of Garth to fling himself like a
child against bars which he knew to be unbreakable. But
men have all the more of that which they contain firmly,
whether manhood or sorrow or just the ache of the thought
that what we did is done and that no second chance ever
comes — some other kind of chance, perhaps, but not the
old one again. He stood still and numb, as horses do when
in pain.

V

Abrupt and enormous, the first clang of midnight came
from Gistleham Church while he thus stood, enduring
minute by minute. The clang had the smashing brute
harshness that these sounds acquire when heard from very
near, with t}^e hush of night to make them seem nearer.
Garth counted with a nod each beat of this passing bell
that must toll so much of life and beauty out of the world.

BOOK FIVE

225

The war had begun — now or an hour ago. As the twelfth
hammer stroke’s last vibrations were t linning away his eyes
were caught by a bright light in the gi.rden. He walked to
the window, which had lain open t 11 now, the summer
night streaming in with its infinitesim^d murmur.

He looked out. Two shafts of ligi t thrown from some-
where in the house, above his head, lad turned two strips
of the lawn to brilliant green; and frc m the base of each of
these luminous panels there rose, as a painted bust does from
the bottom of its frame, a head and shoulders silhouetted
in black. Both were motionless. Why, of course. The
lights came from Molly’s and Auberon’s rooms. The
next moment he saw that his own lamp was casting a third
panel of brilliancy out on the lawn, with a third figure
painted in black on its vivid surface. All the three shadows
were stoically still: each perhaps trying to staunch whatever
secret bleeding there was in its own heart with the en-
wrapping beauty of the August midnight and the beloved
river and fields. All the peace that there was in the world
seemed to envelop these still; they felt nothing yet; their
sleep was as quiet as that of a child who has only just
swallowed some venomous germ. The far-off tumble of
the lasher murmured its dreamiest drone; from poplar to
poplar the owls exchanged placid signals; from inland, on
the Great West Road, there came softened by distance the
leisurely rumble and grind of a market-gardener’s horsed
wagon early on its way to Covent Garden.

One of the shadows moved a little and Garth heard a
voice calling, “ Molly! You there? ”

The other shadow started; there was a moment’s pause
and then the reply, “ Hullo, Bron,” in a voice carefully
cheerful.

“ Everything in the garden is lovely,” said Auberon. It
was a catch phrase of the day, but the tone was one of

Q

226

ROUGH JUSTICE

contentment and peace. A kind of sob, like an uncontrol-
lable shudder, shook his father. He saw the child that
had gloated over the daffodils as they swung in the wind at
twilight: “Lamps o’ blooty, lamps o’ blooty! ” No one
had helped the little creature to grow into all that he might
have become, with those eyes that made everything new.
Yet he was unspoilt; he could still delight in the feel of
life as he walked to the slaughter-house.

“ Goo’-night. Fun to-morrow,” said Bron, and one of
the shafts of light gave a quick wink and vanished. The
bust that was framed in the second sank slowly down the
next minute, till the shadow thrown on the lawn was only
that of a head fallen on one side, resting on some vague mass
that threw a low shadow.

Compassion can interpret quickly. “ She’s kneeling,”
thought Garth; “her arms are crossed on the sill; her
cheek is down on one arm and the low mass is her hair and
her shoulders. Oh ! by God, it’s all shaken and quivering.
I can’t stand this: I must go to her.”

He started towards the door, and then checked. What
help could he give.? He might talk, but her lover and her
brother would be dying still. So he stayed in his own cell,
and left her to hers, in their monastery of pain, each to listen
with the prescient ears of the tender-hearted and the wise
to the cracking of the arches that supported their ordered
world.

BOOK SIX

CHAPTER XVII

I

A S any man ’ere,” said Con pany Sergeant-Major
Browning, late of the Gre adier Guards, “ ’ad
Lany service in th’ Army, Navy or any auxiliary
force? ” Out of chaos, or somethin.; so nearly resembling
it as a crowd of recruits still in civiliai clothes, the Sergeant-
Major had just carved Number One Section of A Company
of a new-born battalion of the King’s Own Middlesex
Fusiliers, known in a friendly way as the Comfies. He was
now addressing the sixteen men who in the last twenty
minutes had become a new organism.

Fifteen of them could only hold their tongues. Three
of these were Victor, Fulford and Auberon. A fourth was
Bert, long a doughty Boy Scout, but no Territorial. The
remaining twelve were a teacher of boxing, a market porter
from Smith field, a carroty-haired Irish drover, a hunting
parson, a dour Glasgow shipwright, a Dorsetshire farm hand, a
bagman of florid exterior, a big-game hunter, an elementary
school teacher, a minor professional tenor, a nervous and white
London clerk and a taxi-cab tout from Leicester Square, The
one man who piped up, in reply, was the tout, Alfred Cart:
“ Yessir. Served three year. King’s Ryal Rifle Corps.”

Even after a fortnight of army rations. Cart’s figure was
strikingly rectangular, from the effects of previous famine.
The Sergeant-Major eyed with disrelish this realistic statue
of Want. “ Christ! ” he said, “ an’ it a good regiment! ”
His desire to disbelieve Cart was unmistakable.

Cart asseverated: “S’elp me, Sawjint-Myjor! Got me
pipers.”

“ Fall out, Private Cart,” the Sergeant-Major commanded,
“ an’ carry on drilling the section ’*

227

228 ROUGH JUSTICE

Cart leapt to the front and authenticated his claim by put-
ting the section through its rudiments, in tones of thunder.

Browning watched. “ An’ when did you leave the
army? ” he asked, with disdain, as soon as Cart stood the
section at ease.

“ Four year come Christmas, Sir,” said Cart.

“ An’ so I thought,” said Browning regally. ‘‘ Callin’ a
section a squad! Every ’arf minute! ‘Squad’! Proper
ante-di-luvian ! Any one else like to try ’is ’and for a
stripe? ” The Sergeant-Major cast a look that was almost
imploring at those of the men whose clothes were the best.
“What!” he said. “No ’ealthy ambition! Carry on,
then. Private Cart.” He stalked away to create Number
Two Section.

Number One Section were taken aback: there was no
denying it. Band of brothers and all that, of course, but
still — to be ruled over by Cart, with his thin lips and lowering
brows and measly white face, the colour of grass that has
had a board lying on it for weeks; he looked like an Apache
as the picture papers fancy Apaches. Clearly he was the
man who, of all the sixteen, had fared worst in the world
and dropped lowest; middle-class instinct would sooner have
trusted a gold watch to any one of the other fifteen.

Perhaps the section grew rather absent-minded, through
thinking this over. Certainly Cart’s hold on it presently
slackened. The drill was growing downright bad when
Lloyd, the Regimental Sergeant-Major, hove in sight.
Every one saw him while still far off, bearing down on the
corner where Number One Section was slouching through
its sluggish performance. Cart gave the section a look of
appeal so agonised that Auberon’s bowels of pity moved
him to grunt back over his shoulder to the rear rank, “ Let’s
pull him through.” Fulford, rear-rank man of the same
file, took it up like a shot. “That’s right” — he stage-

BOOK SIX

229

whispered; “give him a chance,” and from that moment
life and swing, precision and elasticity seemed to descend,
like a Holy Ghost, upon the fifteen ’prentice soldiers. They
were above themselves; they melted from formation into
formation, like a corps de hallet\ and Cart, too, rose to the
crisis: lance-corporal’s pay, a whole f urpence extra per day,
was in full view; he barked round his small flock like the most
proudly efficient of sheep-dogs: he never once said “ Squad ! ”

Lloyd watched, with a look of g ave contentment that
would always settle on his face at the sight of a bit of work
decently done. “ Gud! Very gud — for a Monday morn-
ing,” he rapped out, before turning away. The men saw
him talking, afar, to Browning; once he jerked his head
towards themselves. Could he be saying that they might
make soldiers yet?

u

The infant battalion slept on the floor of a vast and
echoing London exhibition hall. Cart lay between Auberon
and Victor. Auberon had for several days been on the
Christian-name plane of friendship with Cart; and^ as soon
as the bugle had blown “ Lights Out ” on the evening of
this great day of hope for the famished procurer of taxis, he
freely offered his two neighbours the handsomest reassurances.
“You can gow on callin’ me Alf,” he said to Auberon,
“after I put me stripe up. You ’aven’t ever got to stan’ me
no more drinks an’ you ’aven’t ever got to call me Cart,
when once I got me rank. But you can call me Corp or
you can call me Alf. On’y down’t call me Cart. Thet’s
discipline, thet is.”

Then he turned round to Victor. “ Down’t tike it ’ard,
do yer. Beak? — me ’avin’ charge o’ the section? ” Nearly
every one had a nickname already; Victor’s was The Beak,
in honour of his Olympian or magisterial distinction of
speech and bearing.

230 ROUGH JUSTICE

“ Good Lord, no! ” Victor answered.

“ Ya see,” Cart earnestly explained, “the wye of it is
this. In drillin’ men, yer got to speak invari’bly as if yer
’ad a quarrel with ’em. Thet’s discipline, thet is. All-a-
same I know it got to come a bit thick ’avin’ somebody like
me a-tellin’ orf the like o’ you.”

“ Oh, I suppose we’re all Socialists now.” Victor quoted,
rather listlessly, a current saying of the clubs.

“You a Sowshilist! ” Cart marvelled and reasoned
silently for a minute, and then asked, ‘‘Yn’t yer got no
means? ”

“ Oh, a pittance,” said Victor.

“Wot’s Sowshilism, then? Yn’t it you can’t ’ardly get
’old of a bit but wot it’s took off yer? Wot use is thet
to you?” Again -the mind of the section -commander-
elect travailed silently for a while. Lance-Corporal’s pay
— one and fourpence a day, one and fourpence a day,
if only prospective. He testified fervently: “ I yn’t a
Sowshilist! ”

“ Nor I,” said Victor. But he was too weary just now
to try to show an illiterate rough what irony was.

Cart took Auberon aside next day. “ That chum o’
yourn yn’t unwell, I’spowse? ” he asked. Cart’s scowling
white mask looked anxious.

“ No. Why? ” said Auberon.

“ Fust ’e says ’e’s a Sowshilist. Then ’e says ’e yn’t.
Down’t seem to know wot ’e is, do ’e? ”

“ That’s all right,” said Auberon, relieved. “ He always
talks like that”

“ Chronic, ah? I tell ya strite, if I ’ad any brass an’
felt like turnin’ Sowshilist, I’d get me ’at an’ gow an’ sec
me doctor.”

Auberon explained — it was The Beak’s little game —
kind of pulling your leg without laughingj you didn’t have

BOOK SIX

*31

to make out what it meant; nobody :ould; but The Beak
was all right, every time.

Cart’s fears for Victor’s reason wer?; lulled to rest for the
time. Still, he was clearly going tc keep an eye on the
case: a good section-commander must father his men.

A miracle, you observe, was hap; ening: sixteen diverse
men were cementing themselves iivo a family. Of all
classes, of all ages from eighteen to fifty, nearly all of them
were finding one another incredibly go )d to live with. Each
of them was, to most of the others, a curious find; everybody
was chaffed and nothing was taken amiss. They had their
heroes, too, as if they were boys again, and among these
was Browning, the man who was what they all wished to be
— the made soldier; he had the key; he carried the lamp;
with his clanging gong of a voice and storming way of
getting things done as they should be, he seemed to lift and
haul them along towards soldierly smartness.

Auberon felt he had never known there was so good a
life to be lived on earth. Always to have just some one
plain and not hard thing to do; to be free to give yourself
up, without a sense of shirking, to whole days of rude health,
to let yourself go, with a will, in the swing of marching,
the patterned dances of drill, the thrilling symbolism of
guards, with the changeful chain of blithe or grave calls
blown on bugles to lead you through the busy, easy day It
felt as if you were friends with whatever it was that made
the world go round; you were in with the sun from rise to
set, the stars you watched at night, as a sentry, were com-
rades moving on their appointed posts, like yourself. It was
as though they had all been given a second chance, or new
start in life, and at times it all felt so good that it almost
seemed as if it must be wicked.

ROUGH JUSTICE

232

III

Sergeant-Major Browning must have suffered agonies of
self-restraint during those first months of recruit drill in
London. In that resonant exhibition-hall things were too
public. You couldn’t put the fear of God into these
Kitchener rabbits without being heard all over London —
and checked, perhaps, by some little ass of a New Army
officer. But now the battalion was to go into camp. A
man would be able to do himself justice.

So the first notes of Reveille were hardly out of the bugle,
the morning after the Comfies went into camp, when
Browning burst into the hut where Number One Section
lay. He hated getting up so early that he could be there,
spick and span, at that moment. He did not mean to have
his effort go to waste by letting the men leap up from their
plank beds before he had time to make them do it under
fire from his manly tongue. Thus he fairly beat the bugler.

The smash, when he did let fly at the awakening men,
was like the burst of a tank of raw sewage. Auberon had
known the table-talk of rotten sets at Oxford and the filth
exchanged as conversation by scrubby “ bloods ” at school.
But he recognised, as he scrambled to his feet, that, in this
vein of eloquence, no seat of learning had anything to teach
Browning.

Victor had less than Auberon had of the dog’s trick of
awaking instantaneously out of the deepest sleep, all ready
for action. So he was still recumbent, and rubbing be-
wildered eyes, when Browning halted opposite Victor’s
outstretched feet. With the smashing nearness of the clap
that puts a climax to a thunderstorm, a grenade of par-
ticularly intimate invective detonated over Victor’s ears; it
banged against their drums — kicked and hammered on the
doors. “ Out of it! Bloody ’ogl Wallowin’ there in yer

BOOK SIX

233

slime! Out of it, ya stinkin’ loafer! Sulk, you bloody

, would yer? I’ll mark yer. FU ’ave no bloody

swabs shirkin’ in this crowd. Triin’ it on with your

bloody lie-a-bed tricks! Oui of it, ya mangy

snot ! ”

Victor shambled up anyhow, on tc his feet. He looked
as if the jet of muck that was pumped full in his face, with an
energy like a fire-engine’s, numbed as well as befouled him.
Branding him with a venomous m te-taking look and a
final “ I’ll mark yer,” the foul cyclc^ne worked its way on
to the hut’s farther door. Victor, of course, had done
Browning a sort of wrong — had engaged his attention till
every other man in the hut was so manifestly risen and
struggling into his trousers that nothing was now left for
the martyr to early rising to do but to stalk out of the hut,

only turning to fulminate from the door, “ Worst hut

in all this bloody country! Worst mob of ! Get on

p’rade! I’ll see you bloody well sweat for it! ”

This undertaking the Sergeant-Major was able faithfully
to fulfil; for no officer of the Cqmpany was out of bed that
morning for the six- thirty parade.

First the Sergeant-Major gave A Company an hour of
“ physical drill ” at its hardest and fastest. It was disgusting:
nobody showed signs of wear. Most of the weaker men
had been secretly getting themselves into condition — dropping
their whisky and their smokes and any little favourite sins
against good training, for fear they should never get to the
front. This was hard on Browning. His own strength
was a glory and a wonder: still, he had been in the public-
house business for two years, since leaving the Guards. But
he knew the men’s stomachs were empty all right, whereas
he had levied a bowl of tea and some biscuits from the early-
rising corporal-cook before starting. So he led the men a
mile at the double, not straight ahead, but in small twisty

234 ROUGH JUSTI CE

coils and giddying loops, circling in and out on the jewelled
grass. One of the younger boys fainted at last.

Browning exulted. “ Lug ’im out, you — and you,” he
sang out to two men; and then, to the rest, “ Get on with
it, ya bloody grease-merchants! ”

The convolutions went on rather faster. Passing the
two men who had fallen out by order and were now trying
to revive the limp object that they had dragged out of action,
Browning roared to them, “God a’mightyl D’ya think
yer paid to be ’ospital nurses? Get back to yer places an’
listen next time what th’ Army Act says about ’angin’ back
to atten’ to the wounded.”

A man in Number One Section, Smythe, the little pallid,
set-faced City clerk, was the next one to faint. “’Aul ’im
out!” Browning yelled triumphantly. “This’ll sweat the
booze out o’ yer guts.” He was pulEng a little himself.
But he did not shirk. This was worth the fag.

Two more men were stretched among the wet docks and
nettles before the bugle from the misty camp among the
trees blew breakfast. As Browning stalked off the parade-
ground he threw back an order over his shoulder: “ Get
the bloody casualties shifted. Sergeant Burrows. What?
Where to? Hell. Any old place.”

Some of the men’s faces were greenish or yellowish.
Victor’s and Fulford’s were two of them. Auberon’s
breath was scarcely quickened; his face wore its robust red-
brown; his full eyes were almost bluish with clearness in
the whites, round their lustrous brown pupils. It was all
fun to him. But he had trained crews and teams in his
time and he knew that this showy business of sweating men
on empty stomachs was just silly. Besides it hurt him to
see Victor look so cheap. As the men tailed off to the huts
he edged up to Victor. “ Bit of a grind, that,” said Auberon,
almost feigning, in a friendly way, the fatigue he did not feel.

BOOK SIX

235

“ Oh, it was all right,” Victor said 1 felessly.

In the hut, the breakfast of Numb( r One Section began
in silence. When Gaydon, the florid faced bagman, piped
up at last, “ If the Colonel were told, that swine would be
for it,” no one supported him.

“ Hwat’s the use o’ squealin’?” said Terence McGurk,
the huge and red-headed. “ The P g’lars do more, I’ll
engage, every morn in’ comes out o’ th sky.”

“ Thet’s right. Ginger,” little Smy he said quietly. He
had just crawled back to the hut.

Food and their own stubborn will to make the best of
things were restoring the men’s spirits: Cart, the military
veteran and student of mankind, provided a safety-valve for
any residual ill-feeling in the form of soldierly abuse of all
who were not infantry. Cavalry and Guards had had a lot
too much to do with running this old show in France and
here. “Gaw’ds!” he said. “They don’t know ’arf o’
nothing, on’y ’ow to mike a noise. See ’em salute! You’d
’ear ’em ’arf a mile off. Bangin’ their ’eels together!
Beatin’ the dust out o’ their caps and their slacks like bloody
cawpets! Ah! — an’ kevalry! Flingin’ their ’eads right
an’ leP when they number orf. God ’elp the lads in
Frawnce, they’re in bad ’ands. All-a-same, they’ll pull it
orf. They got to, them an’ us.”

This last was the feeling that ruled everything. The
job had got to be donej you couldn’t bother about the
characters of people with whom you were working to put
out a fire.

IV

At the end of another two months Auberon was to gain
dazzling and utterly unexpected promotion. The Company
were digging a trench in the Wiltshire chalk, and Auberon’s
happy body was putting up a kind of physical hymn of
jubilation by making the white rubble fly out on to the turf

236 ROUGH JUSTICE

in a briskly rhythmical sequence of jets as his spade swung
back and forth lustily in the shallow bed of the trench.

“ Stout fellow, that,” said Captain Black, the Company
commander, as he passed with Browning.

“ Might make a soldier. Sir, in time,” the Sergeant-
Major allowed, without enthusiasm.

“ Any good at his drill? ” The Captain looked at
Browning sharply as he spoke. Black was not really the
man to wait for his Sergeant-Major to tell him what a
private was worth.

Browning was cautious. “ ’E’s no genius. Sir. ’E gives
’is mind to ’is work.”

** Could he command a section? ”

“ I’d ’ardly say that. Sir. ’E . might make a second to
Corp’ral Cart in Number One Section.”

“ Put him up for a stripe,” said the Captain.

Browning sent for Auberon that night. “ Garth,” he
said, “ I’ve kep’ an eye on you, this long time back. I
fancy I know a good man soon’s I see ’im. Any’ow I’ve
made up me mind to recommen’ you to Captain Black for a
stripe. An’ I ’ope very sincerely you’ll do a bit o’ credit to
me judgement.”

Auberon said he would try, and in three days his name
was in orders and Browning had “ borrowed ” a fiver, the
whole of Auberon’s available cash, with a few brotherly
words about all N.C.O.’s stickin’ together.

To Auberon’s further astonishment the whole hut took
his preferment like so many angels. Cart, now a full Cor-
poral, was unmistakably pleased at having Auberon for a
vice-gerent During the working day Cart concealed this
emotion under a manner austerely authoritative. “ I want
a bit more of a move got on. Corporal Gawth, with them
men layin’ aht their kits,” he would say dryly and exactingly.
The first time that Auberon essayed to drill the section,

BOOK SIX

237

Cart was outwardly censorious. “ It yn’t wot’s required,”
he said. “ We want a loud, firm vyct , an’ a bit ’aughty, ’s
if you was tellin’ orf the men for sutthir Ic they done.” Only
after the toils of the day, when Cart and Auberon would
have an hour’s quiet talk over their e\‘ining pint of ale in a
corner of the Corporals’ Mess — one of them always standing
the first half-pint, and the other the second — would Cart
unbend. There he avowed the extre ae terror with which
he had found himself in command over dragons of social
prestige like The Beak, the Corner ’()use (as Devine, the
slayer of lions, was called), Caruso the Song (Capel) and the
Bishop (the hunting parson).

“ There’s on’y two things,” Cart confessed, “ as kep’ me
up. Fair rygin’, thet’s wot I been, to get on a bit in the
Army so’s me young lidy and me can get married. Thet
was one thing. Thet’s ambition, thet is. Four year I been
courtin’. Anythink doin’, yerself, that wye.? ”

Cart was seriously concerned lest Auberon should never
know the transports of virtuous love. “ Runnin’ after every
bit o’ fluff yer see, sime’s a dog, thet’s on’y lus’, thet is.
Thet’s nothink.” Cart wanted Auberon to have his share
of all the real good things. For it seemed that Cart’s second
prop and stay, at the crisis of his fate, had been Auberon’s
notion of prompting the section to pull him through, under
Lloyd’s critical eyes, on the day of Cart’s first ordeal as its
commander. “ Pulled me through when I was beat an’
’opeless. Thet’s v/ot you done. Thet’s lyelty, thet is. If
we was all like you, we’d ’ave a proper country.”

Absurd! As if it had not been as easy to say what
Auberon had said as to say anything else. But Cart, it
appeared, was full of secret admirations — for Fulford’s quiet
gumption at all crises, for Bert’s Boy Scout dexterity in
signalling, for the unconscious, nerveless hardihood of the
giant McGurk and the nervous, set, quivering pluck of the

238 ROUGH JUSTICE

little white Smythe. “ Mawv’lous set o’ men ! Mawv’-
lous!” Cart and Auberon would now talk over all their
little needs, oddities and ailments with the intimacy of
a father and mother discussing little Jimmy’s rows at
school and wondering why little Joe is so much off his
oats.

Victor seemed to be on the commander’s mind. “ Seems
dized, like, down’t ’e? ” said Cart, as he and Auberon sat
on two up-ended barrels, their voices hidden under the
evening din of the Corporals’ Mess. “Tell yer wot ”

“ Yes? ” said Auberon eagerly.

“ ’Member ’ow the Sawjint-Myjor put it acrorst ’im?
Long agow, at Revelly? ”

“ Yes.”

“ Went orf the -deep end at ’im, proper. Nowtice ’ow
the ol’ Beak took it? ”

“ It knocked him off his perch, all right,” Auberon said
ruefully.

“ Ah. Seems like as if it ’ad cricked sutthing in ’is works
— ’s if ’e cawn’t git owver it. See ’im yesteday, on that
rowt mawch? Mawchin’ fit to mike yer cry. Not a
’yporth o’ swing to it! ”

“ That’s right,” Auberon gravely agreed.

“ No ’elpin’ ’im, neither. ‘ ’Ere,’ I says, five mile from
’ome, ‘gimme a look at thet rifle o’ yourn.’ ‘No!’ ’e
says. Jus’ ‘ No !’ Wouldn’t ’ave me kerry it, no price.
Thet’s pride, thet is. Mikes him a ’ard ’orse to trine.”

V

On a cloudless June evening Auberon made an opportunity
to get Victor out of camp for a walk after tea, when the
day’s parades were done and all men were free. At first
Victor said he was tired — thought he would lie on his cot
and read something; then he jumped up, as if reading were

BOOK SIX 239

dross, and said restlessly. “No. L t us get out of this.

* Which way? ’ Oh, anywhere.”

So Auberon chose their direction. Through a mile of
warm heather and bracken, and tl en between gardens
vivacious with pinks and roses he aade for the nearest
country town. It was the seat of m my ripened amenities
— grave, mellow Georgian houses with Tennysonian
pleasaunces round them and, at the quarter hours, a low
cooing of bells.

They tried to dine at a big genial inn of red brick with a
wisteria clambering about it and the clean glass and silver
shining on many empty tables in its open-windowed “ coffee
room.” But this was an “ Officers’ house so the pretty
girl in charge looked with embarrassed kindly eyes at their
uniforms and had to say it was full. The little rebuff
seemed to fret Victor. “ Oh, let’s clear out,” he said,
before she could finish. They fell back on a clean public-
house where “ sausage and mashed ” never failed. There
was no discomfort about it — much more comfort, indeed,
than in eating among outraged Staff colonels and majors.
Why did Victor not sprinkle the incident with the glittering
spray of his old wit? Auberon desired the lawful pleasure
of standing, blinking and wondering, in the midst of that
dazzling mist, as in a shower-bath. But none of it came;
the fountain was not playing as of old.

Certain things seemed to have got upon Victor’s nerves;
as your tongue seeks persistently the sharp point of a broken
tooth, to hurt itself with, so did Victor come back again and
again to trivial things that he had overheard in the Officers’
Mess or the Sergeants’ Mess, as a fatigue man, washing the
grease off dirty plates with tepid water. Did Auberon
know that the virtuous Fulford had just made friends with
Mammon.? — that Browning was putting Fulford up for
Sergeant of their platoon? Even worse, it seemed, for the

240 ROUGH JUSTICE

peace of Victor’s mind than Browning’s traffic in stripes was
the Officers’ Mess, with its witless, ill-conditioned “ rags ”
and its poor old dug-out Colonel, a second-rate younger son
of a decayed family, a man dignified and clean, but stupid
and cold and sadly bewildered by his task of teaching manners
to whipper-snappers and hobbledehoys.

Auberon couldn’t quite see that it mattered so much:
Black, at any rate, was a regular top-hole man, and little
Mellett, who commanded the platoon, was a real good un
as well. Besides, every team had its tail. He did not say
this to Victor. Victor was not a man to talk platitudes to.
But Auberon had come to think, more and more, that quite a
lot of old platitudes were most shiningly and engagingly true.

After their meal they walked up the comely street of
modest houses of state to which the Wiltshire squires of two
hundred years ago had come, when the hunting was over,
to give their wives and daughters a good time in their turn.
From somewhere or other a searchlight was throwing its
shafts of light about the mystic deeps of the dusk j each groped
along its beat till it met some other luminous sentry moving
on its post across the under side of the sky. From heavily
curtained windows little trickles and jets of brilliant light
spurted and leaked, as if the tight walls of the houses were
squeezing this overflow out of packed bales of festal radiance
within. The tender twilight and the hum of the country
town settling down to its rest went to Auberon’s head; a
snatch of a song came from an open window; all the
murmurous stir of friendly English existence was abroad.

Half the battalion seemed to be out walking, singly or in
couples, under the whispering almonds and acacias of a sort
of boulevard. “ Well, I suppose you must have all sorts in
a crowd,’-^ the platitudinarian Auberon murmured in mild
insurrection against the ironic sourness of Victor’s remarks
on almost every acquaintance they passed.

BOOK SIX

241

** Oh? ” Victor’s voice was shrill with a falsetto don-
nish petulance. “Were there all s<»rts in the crowd at
Thermopylae? Or at Agincourt? ”

“ There was good old Pistol, you icnow.” Auberon, to
his amazement, found himself citing a thing out of a book —
a little blue copy of Henry V. that Molly had given him.
He had found it strangely delicious t* read, in spite of the
author’s deplorable reputation amon most of Auberon’s
friends.

“Pistol — Bardolph — Nym”; Victor counted them out,
like one musing drearily. “ We’vo got ’em all. But
where’s Fluellen? ”

“Well — there!” said Auberon doggedly. He pointed
straight ahead, where Sergeant-Major Lloyd was walking
alone. A Regimental Sergeant-Major is often alone. In
his battalion he is the loneliest man. No other non-com-
missioned comes near him in rank. Every officer is far
above him. Like some of the damned, in legend, he dwells
in a middle void, hung up between heaven and earth.

Victor had never taken much notice of Lloyd. “ Old
Regular? ” he asked.

“ Twenty-three years’ service,” said Auberon reverently.

“ Oh, then ” Victor made a contemptuous gesture.

At that moment the sharp profile of Lloyd’s face showed
clear under a lamp as he turned left to enter a public-house,
where he would sometimes drink, of an evening, his one
glass of beer.

“Good!” said Victor. “I’ll show you.” His voice
had a forced calmness now.

Victor was making straight for the door by which Lloyd
had gone in. It was the door of the least public of the
house’s many bars, “In we go!” Victor said, with a
strained jauntiness that was not in his character. It was
ghastly. But Auberon could not take flight. As if some

R

242 ROUGH JUSTICE

horrible current had set in and involved them both, he
followed Victor through the swing door.

In the tiny slit of a bar there were two high stools and
two ample spittoons, close up under a high red mahogany
counter. The Sergeant-Major had taken one of the stools,
but his beer had not come yet.

“ Evening, Major,” Victor began. He was doing the
bluff, jovial touch — overdoing it, in a way that made
Auberon shudder. “ Major! ” — no doubt Victor had
heard one of the older sergeants address Lloyd like that.

The Sergeant-Major eyed their regimental badges. “ Men
of the seventh battalion? ” he asked.

“ That’s it. Sir,” Auberon said, very respectfully.

But Victor was beyond recall. “ Let me persuade you,”
Auberon heard him say in that raffish, unnatural voice. “ A
glass of champagne, Major, after the toils of the day.”

Lloyd made no answer. He took two pennies out of his
right trouser-pocket and laid them down beside the glass of
beer that the barman had now brought him. Then he
walked straight out of the place. In the desolation that he
left behind him the pennies and the untasted beer could
almost be heard crying, like angels, trumpet-tongued, against
the gracelessness that had left them thus frustrated. Auberon
felt as if he had been seeing, all his life, the pattern made on
the floor by three old gobs of spittle and two small spills of
beer that had run about, licking up sawdust.

“ I’m sorry, Bron,” Victor was saying. “ I’ve lost hold,
I deserve all he gave me. He couldn’t have been better.”

VI

They walked back to camp, draggle-tailed, with Victor
lapsing into self-pity. He said his mind was losing its edge;
it had gone dull, or something; the chain was slipping on
the cogs, the wheel wouldn’t bite on the rail; oh, he couldn’t

BOOK SIX

243

describe it. Soldiering, he said, hat: always been splendid
to read of — “ glorious war,” a broth: erhood in arms — there
must have been something in it, at so ne time or other. But

now ! Victor’s despairing gest ire seemed to dismiss

their whole life and surroundings as /.opelessly ignoble.

Auberon had nothing to say. He could only take Victor’s
upper arm in one of his own large l ands and pinch it with
an affectionate roughness. Auberon had dealt so little with
books that he had no idea that th('se assistant-teachers ot
the art of living could be perverted into screens for a soft
mind to hold between all the harsh winds of life and itself,
till it becomes so tender that a blast of the real thing may
quell it utterly — or at any rate till reality seems only like
some poor bungled copy or lame illustration of the vision
entertained by the luxurious mind.

Of course Auberon and all the other ’prentice soldiers had,
in some measure, been turned out of Paradise since they
had enlisted. But Auberon was not an easy Adam to
afflict. Even the fiery sword at the gate was a curious
novelty to him*, the serpent himself had points; he was a
grand beast of his kind. The battalion was botched by this
time; nothing could now make it the splendid thing that it
might have been if its training had been equal to its raw
material. But nothing could annul, for Auberon, the en-
chantments of this long summer among stout comrades in
the sun, from daybreak to nightfall; the days of route-
marching across weald and down, with the weather dimming
the wayside roses with dust and brightening them again with
rain; the snugness of deep straw in barns and the deep
placidity of evening hours in bivouacs under the brightening
stars, with little peals of laughter and chaff tinkling through
the dark and the glow of puffed pipes rising and falling; the
lazy week of day-long picnic, lying out loose on the warm
short chalk-land turf, for the battalion musketry course; and

244 ROUGH JUSTICE

night operations, with Auberon somewhere alone in the excit-
ing, confidential darkness, chuckling and grinning while he
skulked stealthily along a ditch or wriggled on his belly across
fields of stubble, quivering with the ungovernable ecstasy of
kittens when primal impulses of furtive swiftness revive in
their baby souls and they stalk visionary prey, with a mysteri-
ous passion of joy, across the oil-clothed floor; most of all,
perhaps, the homeward evening swing of the brown, sweat-
stained and sun- filled troops when the dew was laying the
white dust — the jump in the heart when the familiar tune
broke out from the band, on ahead, and the tired column braced
itself to exchange the proud salute with the little mustered
guard that stood, with all England in its keeping, under the
elm by the camp gate; and then the Dismiss and the instant
lapse of all limbs ' into luxurious unconcern as the men
stumped slowly away to their several Ruts, now dear to their
homing minds as the stable is to the horse. If only Victor
could get all the joy of it too!

VII

In the hut they found Cart alone. On these midsummer
nights almost every one stayed out till the last lawful moment,
but Cart had a trick, on the finest evenings, of keeping the
house by himself. Auberon pretty well knew what Cart
did at these times. As soon as the rest were gone off to
their fun, and his rank need not hinder him. Cart would
fuss round the inside of the hut, smartening up to the nines
whatever detail the hut orderlies of the day might have left
short of perfection. He sat at the long table now, smoking
his pipe in his shirt-sleeves and reading with a somewhat
distracted air the murders in the Evening Star^ with
windows opened to the utmost all about him. Like most
of the very poor he hated fresh air and prized heat, in almost
any form, as a thing that cost money. Still, the modern

BOOK SIX

H5

school of draught-lovers was strong in the hut, and Cart
wanted them all to like coming home of an evening.

“What’s this I hear,” said Aube>on, when Victor had
left the hut again for a while, “ — al> ut Fulford?”

“ Thet’s right,” the hut commander said ruefully.
“We’re brikin’ up. All the Upper ’Ouse is gowin’, bar
you an’ The Beak.”

Auberon knew it. As trench life drew nearer, Devine,
the great hunter of lions, had thought twice and then taken
a commission in the Army Ordnance Corps. Gaydon, the
moneyed bagman, had turned Base Cashier and was living
at ease on the fair shores of France. “Wot ow, Bishop,
leavin’ us? ” Cart had sorrowfully had to say to the hunting
parson three days ago, when that divine had said good-bye,
to become an Army Chaplain in Devonshire.

Auberon thought he saw how it hurt Cart. Men were
fleeing — so Cart saw it — from his command. He must
have failed somewhere, and yet he couldn’t see where. “ I
can’t do no better,” he said to Auberon now, with a certain
return, in his face, of the defeated look with which he had
first emerged from the lower depths, to enlist. “ I’ve kep’
the grease out o’ me guts. I ain’t swore at the men — not to
call swearin’. I’ve kep’ the ’ut respectable.”

He had indeed. On points of parlour manners Cart had
been a veritable dragon. When “Turmits,” the farm hand
from Dorset, had given a mighty belch at dinner. Cart had
not cast upon the misdemeanant, at the moment, so much as
an identifying glance. But during the next pause in the
talk he had raised his voice solemnly. “ Sutthink ’appened,”
he said, “ five minutes agow, which I ’ope and arsk it may
never ’appen again in this ’ut.”

But Cart seemed to see his past exertions now as so many
feilures. And yet, a minute after, he spoke as if ashamed
of such a murmur against fate. “ Down’t you tike no

246 ROUGH JUSTICE

’eed,” he said, after a pause, “ o’ what I said jus’ now, fust
gow orf. Come strite orf me chest, thet’s wot it done.
Thet’s wawnt o’ self-restrynt, thet is. Down’t you ’eed
it.” Cart paused again and then said fervently: “ Gord! if
we could on’y all stick on together, sime’s we are, I wouldn’
call the King me uncle.”

Auberon saw better now. Cart’s pangs were not those
of personal disappointment alone, but also those of the aching
affection that sets sold cattle breaking loose to rush back to
the harshest of lost friends and the least luxurious of homes.
Cart was being bereaved.

Victor’s blank face reappeared at the door “ ’E’ll be
’oppin’ it next,” Cart muttered gloomily.

“ I don’t think, Alf,” Auberon answered, after gravely
weighing the chances.

CHAPTER XVIII

I

A LOW-BROWED dawn was looking sulky when
the men of Number One Section took their first
look at France. For twelve hours they had been
packed tightly into some sort of squ are cabin, deep in the
bowels of a black ship with no lights, vvhich had stolen across
from Southampton to Havre in the ni ';ht.

The weather had been dirty and, when the contents of
all stomachs had been well churned by the sea, the cabin
had become dirty too. “ ’Orrors o’ war! ’Orrors of war! ”
Corporal Cart had said cheerfully, as he ministered to his
afflicted command. “ The ol’ Boche’ll be nothink to this.”
Like all wise physicians. Cart had sought chiefly to second
the operations of nature: “ ’Eave oh, Turmits,” he would
say; “strite before yer! ” “Gow it, Beak,” he would say;
“let ’em ’ave it. Thet’s the stuff to give ’em.” But a
last the ship had bumped against the quay at Havre, flinched
away, and come to rest, with quiet harbour ripples flapping
against her sides.

Stiff, cheap and befouled, the men came out of the dark
stinking heat of the ship into a raw north wind and shambled
down a steep gangway to a flagged quay veined with many
sunk lines of railway. There they fell in and were “ stood
easy ” for more than an hour.

Nobody looked at them. Frenchmen had long since
ceased to be stirred by the landing of more British troops.
A gang of German prisoners were loading trucks with coal
from a ship; they worked with lifeless diligence, their feces
empty of all expression, like men whose traffic with happiness
had ended many years ago. Almost as dreary to look at as
these blank-faced automata were another gang of men who
were slackly shifting timber. These wore dirty khaki, and

247

248 ROUGH JUSTICE

almost every regimental badge in the army seemed to be
worn by one or more of them. A little A.S.C. corporal
clerk who slouched across the quay from a hut to an office
in a shed threw his fellow-corporal, Cart, a cheery Cockney
hail of “Wot ow, soldier!” and grinned meaningly
towards the khaki dock-labourers. “ Some o’ the larky
boys, Corp,” he informed the newcomer to this theatre
of war.

“ Wot they done? ” Cart asked him. “ Liked a glass o’
beer? ”

The other Cockney leered. “ Liked a bit o’ fluff.
Them’s V.D.’s, Corp. Nummer Ex ’Orspital. Orficers
among ’em. Two ’oly chaplains, too. ’Ave to grub wi’
the men, they do. No orficers’ ablution, neither. Ah,
they put ’em through it, proper.”

A hospital train clanked slowly over many intersecting
points on to the quay and drew up by a green-and-white
hospital ship. Locfs had just been fought, and the train was
full of some of the last rags and shreds that our High
Command had made of the magnificent cloth given to it to
cut victory out of. In a few minutes more this human
litter was being carried on board the hospital ship, on
stretchers, by men with grizzled heads and stiffish joints,
turned out of the trenches for rheumatism, bronchitis or just
the slowness of years.

To Auberon even these dismal wisps of war refuse sup-
plied a kind of stimulation. The foul gastric stench that
still stuck in his nostrils, the leaden chill of France’s unwel-
coming face in the glum dawn, engendered in Auberon a
curious secret glee. It felt as if some winter night were
closing in with an unexpected harshness round a hut with a
great fire roaring inside. No doubt he was just drawing up
closer to the heartening internal blaze that the adventurous
spirit carries about with it. He found he had to grin.

BOOK SIX

249

privately, with an unaccountable exaltation, just because
everything was, superficially, so beastly .

But Victor? Was that fire burnii g in Victor all right?
For the twentieth time that morn in *; Auberon glanced at
him. Victor was standing in a corr mon attitude of tired
soldiers — using his rifle as a prop or nying-buttress, its butt
on the ground behind him, its mu 'zle against his back,
shoring him up. He was looking in luriously at the grimy
party of incontinents whose joy of l.fe had brought them
here to slave at shifting sodden timber. Auberon’s eye met
Sergeant Fulford’s and found that Fulford’s was on Victor
too. Fulford looked anxious.

At last there was a stir. From somewhere up at the
landward end of the quay Captain Black came back almost
bounding towards the Company. Little Mellett was striding
alongside the Captain, his cane grasped by the ferrule and
swishing briskly behind him, like some tiny lion’s lashing
tail. Every one knew what that meant.

In the sky a half-hearted attempt at a lurid sunrise of
wild or impassioned colour had now been finally abandoned.
All colour was gone; the grey air had thickened; the first
flakes of that winter’s snow began to blow about dryly, with
the dust and bits of straw, over the paved quay. In ten
minutes more the snow was falling densely and the men
marched off into a sort of white darkness to investigate the
strange events of war.

II

On their way from the sea to the line of battle, during
the next two weeks, the Comfies made some fine mixed
additions to their experience. Their first night they slept
in a “ rest ” camp of brown tents on a flat of brown mud;
the mud froze at night and ceased to squelch up between
the floor-boards and dirty the men. That was good, but
they had to shave at high speed in the morning, lest the

250 ROUGH JUSTICE

lather should freeze on their chins as they stood in the dark
at the open-air ablution troughs in the windy north end of
the camp. They entrained, in that morning’s twilight, in
goods trucks completely closed in and dark — “ Proper ol’
sleepin’ cars — wot? ” Booker said as he swung himself up
from ground level.

McGurk agreed. “ I’d liefer live in this thravellin’-
thrunk than beyant in the vissel. Be cripes, the time she
felt the say, she was the spit of a strong young horse under
your buttocks.”

Victor was much in request, all the time, as a pundit in
the tongue, habits and geography of France. And Cart, like
a wily psychologist, encouraged this pumping of Victor; he
told Auberon it was good for all parties: “ ’Elps the men to
get a bit o’ good out o’ wot they ’as to see — an’ stops the
Beak gowin’ orf dead-like. See? — yer gotta mike men —
every man yer ’ave — feel as ’e’s some good at sutthink,
wotever it is. Thet’s self-respec’, thet is. Thet’s ’ow a
man is kep’ up some day, when things is up agen ’im.” So
Cart made a point of asking ‘‘ Wot’s the Frenchy stuff mean.
Beak? ” pointing to the legend “ Hommes 40. Chevaux
8 ” that was painted up, apparently from birth, on every
truck like their own.

The men had listened carefully while Victor explained.
When they found that thirty of them were to go in each
truck, Bowell, the boxing man, the “ White Hope,” chuckled.
“Frenchies know a bit!” he said. “Paint oop ‘Forty
pla-aces ’ outside troock, soa’s when nobbut thirty folk is
shoved inside they’ll say ‘ By gooml We got a cushy doss.
No more nor thirty men for forty pla-aces! ’ ”

“ Thet’s diplowmacy, thet is,” said Cart.

They rumbled and jerked along for a day and a night,
with countless stops and hesitations and endless clangorous
strainings and loosenings of the long train’s many couplings.

BOOK SIX

251

Now and then Cart would peer out through a crack in the
truck’s walls and put tonic question^' to Victor — “ Is th’
Alps anywhere ’andy? ” “ Wots a plice wiv three big

churches? ” “ ’Ere’s a stytion called Sat Apples. W’ere’s

Eat Apples, Beak? Up Wipers wye? ’

“ It’s up every way to our front, if you start down at
Havre.” Victor’s voice was almost p( ttish.

“ Tha’s gettin’ ’oongry. Beak,” said Bowell, sympathetic-
ally. “ Roll on, dinner time.”

Time rolled slowly, like the trai 1. But mid-day did
come at last, and Cart dished out the rations from a sack,
among them dry tea which gave scandal to Ruthven, the
Glasgow riveter and the dourest of scoffers at War Office
intellect — all through the battalion’s training he had been
ejaculating at intervals, “Naething thocht oot! ” “ A’ daft

together! ” “ Nae seestem at a’ ! ” Now he jeered at such

rationing: “ What use wad the tea-leaves be to us noo, in
this kist o’ matchwood? ”

“ God help ye, Jock,” McGurk rebuked him. “ Workin’
inside of a boiler the howl of your life, and never givin’
your mind to what boilers are med for? Han’ me your
dixie.”

The train, according to its custom, was at rest in a leafy
siding just then, and the truck’s side had been thrown open.
McGurk leapt out, with Ruthven’s messing-tin and his
own, and ran forward.

“ Christ! ” Booker exclaimed, a light dawning on his
brain, “ ’e’s gone to kedge it orf o’ the driver! ”

“ Thet’s livin’ on the country, thet is,” Cart pronounced,
commendingly.

But McGurk returned crestfallen. “It niver crossed me
mind,” he said, “ till I was all but up on th’ ingine. The
hot-water merchant beyant is a French y.”

Men turned to Victor, the truck’s God-given channel of

252 ROUGH JUSTICE

communication with the alien. He did not leap up. Elas-
ticity was not in him. But decency was. He rose slowly
to his feet and descended stiffly to the permanent way, the
other 29 men following in seemly single file, each with his
portion of parched tea-leaves ready in his dixie. Corporal
Cart ranged alongside the column enforcing the principle of
the queue and taking his own turn last. Two or three
gallons of boiling water were successfully diverted from their
propulsive labours in the engine, and deep contentment soon
reigned in the truck.

Victor was in high esteem. Wojjer sye to ’im. Beak? ”
Cart asked, with an air of deep interest.

“ Oh, I said ‘ Please! ’ ” Victor answered wearily.

Booker looked round at the others. “ Thet’s ’ow *e
done it!” Booker said admiringly. “Now-one shouldn’t
be without a Beak, not in this sewage country.”

HI

From their first-class carriage windows some of the
officers had looked on at the raid on the engine, the good
ones with joy at seeing the men taking new means to their
ends like wise soldiers when put to it. Captain Black
beckoned to Fulford, whose head was sticking out of a
truck, apd Fulford jumped down and ran along the line to
him. “ Who’s the fellow interpreting, Sergeant? ” Black
asked. “ Private Nevin, isn’t it? ”

“ Yes, Sir.”

“ Talks good French? ”

“ First-rate, Sir. Knows the country too.”

Black turned his face back into the carriage. “ Here’s
the man you’re wanting to help at that billeting job,” he
said to the Adjutant, “ a Sahib; talks French like a Froggy;
rising light of the Bar; Oxford degree; a bit of a flyer, all
round.”

BOOK SIX

253

** Not me — he’d know a lot too much for me,” the middle-
aged Adjutant replied. An old N.O.O. of the Regular
Army, he dreaded the touch of quick t ivilian brains. They
might be inquisitive, critical, dangerou> to a man’s peace.

“ He’s perfectly quiet,” Black .issured him. “ But
dev’lish tired. A ride on ahead or; each of these next
marching days might just set him up f r the trench job.”

Black opened the door and jumped out. “ Walk a bit,”
he said to Fulford. They walked al ead, past the engine,
to where the thin snow was untrodde i. The blackish sky
was laden with snow; the landscape looked sombre and wild
with a sort of melodramatic extravagance; houses and trees
stood black and sharp -edged against the white ground.
“ Well, Sergeant, what’s it all about? ” Black began abruptly,
“ Sir? ” said Fulford. The good sergeant in him had to
be fully assured that an officer was really doing the man-to-
man touch.

“ Oh, of course I’ve no right to ask. You’re quite free
to snub me. Still — what’s all this game? ”

“ Game, Sir? ”

“ Is that a snub? — hey? ”

“ Not a bit. Sir.” Fulford was disarmed.

“ Look here,” said Black; “ we’ll all be dead in a few
months. Why not let me into this little play you’ve got on !
You don’t think any one could care about this Company
the way I do and not see that you and young Garth think
of pretty well nothing except how to pull Nevin through?
As for you, you old scandal, didn’t you pay through the nose
to that ruffian Browning to jump you up into a sergeant,
just to be able to nurse Nevin better? ”

“ I really fancied I could do the work. Sir,” Fulford
pleaded.

“ You’ve done it,” said Black. “ Done it damn well.
That’s why your stripes didn’t go with the others,” A

254 ROUGH JUSTICE

month or two ago the Company had undergone a purge.
Browning and other birds of his feather had then taken
flight, like swallows that feel the autumn chill coming — but
not overseas. They had enlisted, according to rumour, on
special life-saving terms — to drill and not fight. “No more
purchase in the Army,” Black had said, and had tested on
the parade-ground every new N.C.O.’s power of handling
men, and then had got the worthless ones bundled back into
the ranks. Fulford had come triumphantly through; he
had earned his rank, if ever man did, though he had got it
a little sooner by palm-oil. “ Why, you know as well as I
do,” Black said now, “ that you and Garth — ^and Cart
among the Plebs — are three of the sort that keep England
from rotting. Cart won’t ever get any further, because he
don’t know his three R’s and so he can’t do a Parade State.
Garth I want for a sergeant, first vacancy. You have got
to be Sergeant-Major as soon as Kerr goes. And here are
all of you out as a bodyguard to one lackadaisical private.”

“ Nevin’s an old friend of Garth’s,” said Fulford.

“ Is that all? ”

“ They were at Chellingharii and Oxford together.”

“ That all? ”

“ He’s engaged to Garth’s sister — adopted sister — some
sort of cousin.”

“ Same name? ”

“ Yes.”

“ Not the Miss Garth — a girl of great beauty — that
everybody raved about at Cambridge a few years ago? ”

“ That’s right.”

“ You know her? ”

“ I’ve met her.”

Black had extraordinarily sympathetic eyes, and they met
F ulford’s as he risked the question, “And — that was enough? ”

“It was,” said Fulford, There was a short pause.

BOOK SIX

*55

** Garth, too? ” Black presently asked.

“ I’m not sure. He don’t talk of h mself.”

“ No, he’s a fearful thoroughbred.” There was a pause
again. They were coming to know e xh other so well that
Black could say presently, “ So you’re b th telling Satan to get
him behind you, and seeing the dangerous rival safe through
the wars. Well, we’re all queer. H llo! The old bus is
coming to life.” The engine whistlec behind them. They
went back to their places. “ I’ll do what I can,” Black
said before they parted with the most ( )rmal salutes.

Black at once pressed his point with the Adjutant, Burt.
Burt’s want of French, he said, wouldn’t matter a bit if he
had a fellow like Nevin to help him sling the lingo.

Burt was adamant. “ It’s bad enough,” he said, “ trying
to talk French before a lot of Frenchies. I’m not having
any damned Frenchified Britisher round, to make me feel a
worse fool every time.”

So Victor’s fate was not altered.

IV

Number One Section slept soundly on the truck’s floor
and were only awakened by the loud voices of sergeants
outside and the brusque throwing open of the truck’s doors.
The train had stopped at some small country station; the
first cold spikes of sunlight were striking upwards beyond a
landscape frozen stiff — trees and fences furry with hoar frost;
a great forest was in the east, and from somewhere behind it
there came a ceaseless grumbling sound, puissant but distant,
rising and falling in undulating curves that affected the ear
as a wide tract of long rollers or a far-off sky-line of low
downs affects the eye.

“ Thet’s artillery, thet is,” Cart said to his awakening
men as, one by one, they ceased rubbing their eyes and
listened, amazed at the continuity and slow dignity of it;

256 ROUGH JUSTICE

they were like urban children taken into a pinewood and
listening in admiration and awe to the low soughing murmur
that never ceases overhead, be the day never so windless —
till this awe was dissolved in the returning outpour of queries
and chaff. “ Wot stytion, Corp? ” “ Chynge for Wipers? ”

“ Wot! All chynge? ” “ ’Ere, porter! ” “ Keb! keb! ”

From that place to the front it was a three-day march,
and the first day was good. The ground was iron with
frost; it rang underfoot, and the white nap that thickened
every twig of the trees made the country look Christmas-
cardy and jolly.

The men marched all day with the big Forest of Nieppe
between them and the low thunderous grumble that rolled
and rumbled beyond it in the east. Being new to the game,
most of them listened, for most of the time, to that eternal
mumbling in the distance and drank deep of the sense of
being at last where they had longed to be. “ The Lorrd is
varra gude,” said Ruthven, almost to himself, after an hour
or two of silent satisfaction.

“ Aye, Jock,” the White Hope agreed. “ We’re through
wi’ plain stoof now.”

Booker concurred. “ Thet’s raht. Pyin’ aht all the
tahm, thet’s wot we been. Pyin’ aht. Froo the nowse.
Nah we’ll get a bit o’ value.”

On that day of frost and sun they marched a good four-
teen miles, with heavenly interludes when the “ Company
cookers,” or kitchens on wheels, shed perfumes sweeter than
rose or violet — the morning bacon, the mid-day stew, the
evening tea, each divinely appropriate to its season. And
then a new care visited the Section’s anxious parents. Cart
and Auberon. What would to-night’s barn billet be like?
Many holes in the roof? A good depth of straw, or thin?
And the farmer’s wife — would she let them all sit in the
warm kitchen?

BOOK SIX

257

They reached their night’s quarters at dusk, and Auberon,
fortified on the linguistic side by Victor, set out across the
dungy farmyard to the house, to be nice to the farmer’s
wife, while the other thirty men of N ur iber One and N umber
Two Sections waited in the chilly darkness of the barn, in
agonies of suspense.

The embassage prospered — not th ough Auberon’s elo-
quence. It was at the sight of Viet )r’s face, now nearly
dead white, with broad zones of black round the eyes, that
the stout woman’s first hesitation seemed to collapse into a
look of pity. “ Mais entrez, entrez,” she said; “ oui, oui,
tous les camarades. Entrez seulement.” The woman
looked at Victor all the time, mothering him with her eyes.

Auberon sped across to the barn with the news, and the
tired men clodhopped joyfully into the kitchen, each wiping
his boots conscientiously at the door and saying “ Bong swore,
Madame,” like a good child at a party. There they sat and
smoked and behaved nicely and drank little earthenware
bowls of inexpressibly weak coffee for the good of the
house, at a penny a bowl. The good wife’s son was a French
infantryman, discharged after the famous victory on the
Marne, where he had left a leg. He drew Victor into a
long fluent talk in which the words “ Anglais ” and “ re-
traite ” kept on recurring very often. Somehow or other
the British listeners gathered that to the one-legged French-
man their own British vision of France as a little boy saved
from a vicious German bull by a gallant adult Britain was
not quite so present as it should be.

“ There down’t seem to be quite so much bleat abaht
English ’eroes o’ Mons, this side o’ the water,” Booker said
reflectively, when the men were curled up in the straw for
the night.

“ No thenkfulness at all, it seems to me,” said little
Smythe severely.

8

258

ROUGH JUSTICE

V

The weather broke that night and the battalion fell in,
after breakfast, in violent rain.

An order had come round for the men to parade in great-
coats. Captain Black was furious; he knew that nothing
but waterproof ground-sheets, worn like loose capes, were
of use on such days. But what could he do? Colonel’s
orders.

In half an hour the greatcoats were soaked. Then the
rain held up for a while, but the thick, spongy greatcoats
acted as forests and glaciers do; they kept up the water
supply when the rain failed; the men’s shirts got no chance
of drying on them before the rain came again. So, both
when it poured and when it did hot, the maximum weight
of rain water was carried by all.

As things grew worse, the men resorted to chaflF. It was
not brilliant; still, the menaced fortress of cheerfulness
had to be actively defended. “ Are ye thinkin’, Jock,” said
McGurk, “ ye’d better ha’ left the wife’s carpet slippers at
home, on the pianny? ” Every soldier knows, in the field,
what every comrade has in his pack ; is it not all tumbled
out, of a night, in the straw?

Ruthven replied, “ If it’s barrgains ye’re huntin’. I’m no
sellin’.”

“ Is ut me carry your ould brogues from this to Berlin? ”
said McGurk. “ I’d as lief be thransportin’ Turmits’
library.”

It was an open secret that Turmits, bitten with the love
of knowledge, carried about him a tiny red manual, English
and French Conversation.

Three miles farther on, McGurk was grossly shamming
fatigue. No one had ever seen McGurk tired. No one
could hope to. Still, when friends were visibly fagged, the

BOOK SIX

259

sociable Celt would simulate weariness, by way of standing
in. “ Quid St. Martin’s the lad,” he grunted, “ the way he
got shut of wan half of his greatcoat.”

“Saint!” the dour Scottish Ca vinist jeered. “He
desairved to be clappit into the j^.g for mutilation of
kit.”

A fresh fury of rain, teeming d iwn in straight rods,
closed all lips for a time. When it sla -:kened a little, Booker
announced, “ I’ve a steel shyvin’ mirr ^r I’d give awye to the
poor.”

There was no ugly rush for the proffered gift. Other
men, too, were counting their burdens just then by the
ounce and considering which of their private possessions they
would miss least if they should throw it away. “ A mirror!
To shave wi’!” groaned the descendant of Covenanters,
reprovingly. “ Arrch oop your back, mon, to your load o’
womanish vanities. Dook your head doon an’ be damned
to appairances ! ”

Many men were marching already with their heads and
shoulders bent well down and thrust far forward, to let their
packs rest balanced on the upper part of tjie back and ease
the cut of the straps into the shoulders. Booker marched
upright. “ Thenk Gawd,” he said, “ for one bloody thing.
Th’ emminition pouches pulls you forrard so’s you won’t
fall down on yer beckside, an’ the pack stops the pouches
’aulin’ you down on to yer belly.”

“ Thet’s compensytion, thet is,” said Corporal Cart.
“ Thet’s ’ow they built the Forf Bridge, up in Scotland, yn’t
it, Beak? ” Victor seemed not to hear.

The afternoon rain was less vehement, but more assiduous.
Sweating and drenched and weighted down with the rain-
water that had added itself to each man’s original equipment,
the men opened their tunics and shirts at the neck for relief;
the moisture smoked off their bare chests in little clouds; over

260 ROUGH JUSTICE

the whole column a long mist of steam rose as it does from
a flock of sheep driven hard in wet weather.

Eleven miles had been marched when the road took a
turn for the worse. So far it had been made of pretty flat
dirt. It was now made of stone setts; its surface heavily
cambered or arched. These setts were thoroughly greased
with chalky mud. So the right-hand half of the road, where
they marched, wzs a slippery convex slope falling from left
to right; the marching men felt as if they were always
slipping down to the right, like boats edging oflF sideways
from a wind. “ Like mawchin’ a-top o’ Charin’ Crorse
Stytion,” Booker said with disgust. All the Section felt it,
but none quite so manifestly as Victor. The hateful sensa-
tion of making leeway, in spite of himself, towards the ditch
on the right of the road seemed to have got on his nerves.
Every few minutes he shuffled anxiously leftward, scraping
spasmodically with the left edges of his soles so as to prop
himself up towards the crown of the road, and slanting his
body to the left so much as to risk a fall. He was breathing
hard, his mouth open, his eyes full of torment, his skin
sodden and dull bluish-white like a laundress’s hands after
a day in hot water and soda.

Sergeant Fulford always had an eye on every man in the
platoon, and two apiece on Auberon and on Victor. Auberon
was the fittest-looking man in sight. Victor was so much
the opposite that Fulford was leaving his own place in the
middle of the platoon to give Victor the tip to shift cargo a
bit and not list to port, when the surprising order “ March
at attention ” came back from the Colonel, who rode alone
at the head of the column.

There was a blind corner just at the point the Colonel
had reached; so he had seen, before any one else, a group of
four mounted officers waiting on the left, beside the road.
One of them bore a Lieutenant-General’s badge: all wore

BOOK SIX

261

the red and white armlet of a Corps Staff. The General’s
horse stood facing the road, some si>c feet in front of the
others.

The slipping and steaming men puf ed themselves together
desperately, so as to round that corn-T with credit. They
braced up every weary muscle as tigb: as it would go; they
tried hard to fling their heads round to the left, when the
order came, with the almost defiant swing that leaves the
head vibrating at the swing’s end. As Auberon’s eyes
sheered round, in this gesture of homage, and fell on the
sleek, demure horses and on the trim red and gold of the
riders’ gorgets and caps, he saw that one of these magnificent
figures was Claude, and that Claude was wearing the M.C.
ribbon, and another too.

“Jove! ” Auberon thought, behind his dutifully wooden
face. “ Old Claude must have put up a lot of good work.”
He fancied that A.D.C. jobs were given to signally valiant
persons now disabled by wounds. He was trying to see
whether Claude had still got both his arms when a horrible
scraping of iron on stone, behind his own right shoulder,
took off his attention. His rigidly fixed eyes might not be
diverted, but somehow he knew that Victor had lost his
nerve again and had worked up another of those desperate
scuffles between his boots and the greased setts. And then,
instantly, two men in Number Two Section caught the
infection of anxiety, scraped abominably, and lost step.

The Corps Commander’s face darkened. And was he
not wronged? Had he not, on a beastly day, come out to
give the men a sight of their commander? And here were
they marching like a damned labour battalion and wounding
the honest pride that a good commander loves to take in his
men.

Presently Claude came cantering forward along the vacant
left half of the road, his horse’s hoofs flinging mud in the

262 ROUGH JUSTICE

eyes of the left-flank men of the column. He certainly had
all his four limbs. He spoke to the Colonel, who turned
back with him at once and was riding with Claude towards
the rear when the Corps commander himself came trotting
up and met them, almost abreast of Auberon. “ It’s bad
march discipline, Colonel Stowell,” the General said.
“ Damned bad. The saluting too! — rotten! We must get
these things right or we’ll never do anything. Take ’em
back to-morrow — back half-way to where you started to-day.
Make ’em march it again.”

The General rode away, consoled by the subtle luxury of
having been a Roman father. A low rumble of growls and
curses pervaded the leading platoon. “ Lot knows abaht
mawchin’ ! ” “ Settin’ up there on a good ’orse! ” “ Bloody

ol’ geyser!” “Gawd send ’im piles!” Auberon had
heard how French Revolutionary mobs would lug nobles out
of their chariots and lynch them ecstatically. He felt now
that he could see how they came to do that, though of course
it was a rotten thing to do.

VI

That was a bad day, to the finish. As the bedraggled
men of the Section trailed away slowly in the dusk, under
dripping poplars, to their allotted barn, it seemed to Auberon
that a good kitchen stove could never before, in human
history, have been quite so worthy an object of adoration.
Just to sit beside it! To feel the cold wetness become a
warm wetness round your body! But no. The farmer’s
wife was stony. English soldiers had been there before, she
told the supplicating Auberon, and they had got drunk and
broken two chairs.

Auberon called up Victor from the soiled straw on which
he had flopped down in all his equipment, too utterly spent
even to slip the straps oflF his shoulders. “ I should have

BOOK SIX

263

thought ” Victor began to reply in a weakly querulous

voice. That had always been one ol Victor’s pet formulas.
In the good old days it had been gt atly ironic, serving to
introduce some piece of high wisdom ignored by the vulgar.
Now no doubt he “would have tho ight ” that the British
Army’s rulers would not leave its mer to beg for the billeted
soldier’s immemorial right to a place by the fire. But he
did not go on; he rose with Aube on’s help and limped
across the yard and pleaded his besr, in his best French,
like Columbine at Pierrot’s door:

Ouvre-moi ta porte
Pour I’amour de Dieu.

The woman looked at him as women usually did. If it

were he alone ! But no; her vision of the rowdy men

and the two ruined chairs reasserted itself. The envoys
went back defeated, to tell the shivering men in the
barn.

The general grunt of disappointment was almost a wail.
“Ow! Chrahyst! ” Booker lamented, as ^11 the dreadful
implications of their exclusion from Paradise came home to
him. “Ne’er a drawr o’ baccy all the night, not withaht ya
sit aht on the dung ’eap, gettin’ yer death.” Every one
knew how Cart would enforce the order against smoking in
straw.

Under the Corporal’s lead the men stuffed up the chinks
in the lath-and-mud walls of the barn, to keep in all their
hot breath. Some took off all their clothes, hung them over
the rafters and wormed their naked bodies deep into the
straw, regardless of the misery of putting on the cold wet
clothes in the morning. Others burrowed equally deep in
the straw, but with all their clothes on, for wet clothes do
not matter so long as you keep warm in spite of them;
besides they will nearly dry in a night; others tried to get

*64 ROUGH JUSTICE

the best of both courses by stripping and then drying their
garments, one at a time, under their bodies.

When all were in the straw they discussed the war and
God and the deficiencies of their superiors, with contumacious
pungency. They sang the scoffing songs of the hour:

When this bloody war is over.

We won’t soldier any more,

and

Oh my! I don’t want to die.

I want to go ’ome.

Bowell, after careful calculation, announced the poignant
discovery that it was Saturday night.

“ Well, any’ow, there yn’t no church paride to-morrer,”
said Corporal Cart, ever eager to persuade the men of his
command that even, in the darkest hour there were some
few stars of hope or consolation to be descried.

Capel, the tenor, came to his assistance gallantly in this
work of mercy. He wheedled the men into reviving, for
once, a kind of rude part-singing that had amused them long
ago in their happy hut in Essex, after Lights Out. “ Sweet
and Low” was the piece that did best; it is sentimental and
all soldiers are sentimental, behind their scoffs, especially
when they are tired. They crooned as much of it now as
they could remember:

Sweet and low, sweet and low,

Wind of the western sea,

Low, low, breathe and blow.

Wind of the western seal
Over the rolling waters go,

Blow her again to me.

Auberon found himself extraordinarily moved as one addi-
tional man after another joined his voice to the rest. Ex-
quisite people, living in comfort and pleased with nothing

BOOK SIX

265

short of the best, may be somewhat haughty about senti-
mental verses and tunes. To simpl er organisms, with an
almost wholly physical life, some traib ig and sugared melody
may become a window suddenly opem d, through which they
can see lost worlds of beauty and peat e. A kind of fervour
of naive tenderness grew on the voi( es of the men as they
caressed the honeyed melody:

Sleep and rest, sleep an : rest;

Father will come to hee soon;

Rest, rest, on mother’s i reast,

Father will come to thee soon.

When it ended, nobody spoke or moved; Auberon knew,
for a man lying in straw cannot make the slightest movement
without rustling. For himself he lay in ecstasy, feeling
somehow the quickened beat of all the hearts that were
keeping, each to itself, the common secret of their emotion.

The barn, with all its major cracks and holes caulked,
grew frowsty at last with the fetid steam of clothes drying
on hot and dirty bodies. The stinking warmth began to
drug man after man. Auberon was just dropping off, with
his mind full of beautiful thoughts, when a repeated sound,
quite near him, began to express clearly the fact that some
one was tossing restlessly, with convulsive rustlings in the
straw each time he shifted from one side to the other.
Auberon called softly “ Vick! ”

“ Yes? ” came a wakeful voice,

“ Not going to sleep? ” Auberon asked.

“ Who could — in this Black Hole of Calcutta? ”

Either Cart had not slept yet, or he awakened instantly
now like a mother whose child cries in the night. “ Cawn’t
yer get to bye-bye. Beak? ” he said. “ ’Ave one o’ these.”
He was rummaging out a little electric flash-lamp; he turned
the light on his haversack and produced from its depths a

266 ROUGH JUSTICE

small bottle with white tablets in it. He shook one out
into the lid and passed this to Victor. “ Thet’s hasp’rin,
thet is. Sends yer orf when yer exorsted past yer sleep.
My young lidy gev me thet, ’long o’ morphiar an’ stuff to
tike if I got wounded pineful an’ lef’ out. They work it
out a lot, do women — wot might ’appen to yer. Thet’s
imaginytion, thet is.”

Victor stretched an eager hand. “ Two — ” he said,

“ can you spare.? ”

Cart gave him two tablets. “ Shouldn’t tike no more
than two, if I was you,” he said. “ These pick-me-ups ’as
narsty little wyes o’ gettin’ back on yer.”

In ten minutes Victor, though still tossing, was tossing in
his sleep. And then the parents of the family could go
asleep too.

CHAPTER XIX

I

At the end of their fourth diy of marching the
Comfies reached what were c lied reserve trenches.
X X These were not trenches at all. For the British
front at the time was a bluff. Onlj a front trench and a
support trench existed. Behind these no line had been dug.
Reserve trenches only meant the cella s of Pully-la-Fosse, a
mining village now half ruined by th enemy’s intermittent
shelling. The British front trench lay two miles farther
east, so it was part of the business of enemy guns to make
Pully-la-Fosse a place of discomfort.

Each house had one roomy cellar, and holes had been
hacked in the party wall between each cellar and the next,
so as to turn all the cellars of each row of houses into one
long underground gallery. Thus Fulford, who happened
to be the Company Orderly Sergeant of the week, could
pass underground from end to end of a long terrace in five
minutes and see the whole of A Company bedded down
in the straw, in darkness, a cellar to each section. At five
o’clock he came along in this way, stooping through the
low manholes from cellar to cellar; he had a lighted candle
in one hand and a bit of dirty paper in the other and called
out: “ Pay attention, all,” The men had got their harness
off and were just beginning to steam themselves dry. In
the stricken silence that suddenly fell he gave out the order:
“Following men fall in at Quartermaster’s Store at six
o’clock to carry water up to the front line.” The exhausted
men in Number One Section held their breath for the
names. But none of theirs was read out except Bowell’s.

“ Well, thot’s a corf-drop, thot is,” Bowell remarked,
without rancour.

“Fall in right -flank man at the Q. Store,” Fulford

a67

268 ROUGH JUSTICE

advised, “ and you’ll be the first man of this crowd to get to
the front.”

“ Thot’s reet, Sergeant,” said Bowell, with gusto.

About 5.30 Fulford came stooping through again.
“Following men fall in at Quartermaster’s Store at 8 to-
night — rationing party to trenches.” All the remaining
men in Number One Section, except McGurk, Nevin,
Booker and Ruthven, were warned for this liturgy.

Before six o’clock Fulford. revisited them: “Following
men fall in at 8 o’clock, to act as mule leaders, with ration-
ing party: Booker,' McGurk, Nevin, Ruthven. An issue
of rum will be made on return to all men on these three
fatigues.”

II

Victor had liked, horses and ridden them well. But, to
like a strange mule, you — or it — must be a rare and beautiful
soul. And the laden mule that Victor led eastward in the
dark, the last of a little train of six, was clearly at war with
mankind. From the start on, the embittered hybrid made
periodical lunges at Victor with bared teeth; the yellowy
white of its eyes and the close lie of its ears back over its
skull showed up nastily in a thin, watery moonlight.

Led by a disdainful scout from some more experienced
unit, the party filed down a sunk road between lines of
smashed and shredded trunks of trees that looked like shaving-
brushes for extremely large giants. Then their guide struck
off left, up a steep bank beside the road, and the ’prentice
muleteers dragged and beat or kicked the mules up the bank
till they reached an open level that felt strangely naked and
hoisted up, after all their skulking in sunk road and cellar.
Somehow the air here seemed to be infested or suspect, and
Victor gathered that if they had been here in daylight they
would have been under the enemy’s eyes. Far ahead, in
the east, there appeared to be something like a fitfully lighted

BOOK SIX

269

fair-ground viewed from the darkness outside it; a place
where flaring lights, each of which m^ans nothing particular
to the person thus seeing it, move capriciously over some
patch of ground spasmodically ilium mated, now here and
now there — and whence come isolated jarring sounds, reports
from shooting-galleries and bangir^ try - your - strength
machines; a place with some sort of squalid and enigmatic
animation of its own. Where thev were, the ground’s
rough surface was greasy; the mules skated and slid, sweating
and snorting with fright; still, no sheds came to dismember
or stifle.

Many small clouds were crossing the moon: one of these,
a little thicker than the rest, covered the moon abruptly just
before the party reached the wreckage of the older German
front, taken by our troops two months before. The wary
scout gave a lead through a small gap in the tangle of old
barbed wire that sprawled about the slippery ground. Each
man ahead of Victor followed the lead with the fanatical
precision of the tyro eager to prove himself fit. Victor, not
so alert, let his beast sidle a yard or so out of the narrow safe
way. It put a forefoot into a chance loop of wire like a
big rabbit snare, and it was down before Victor knew it was
falling — sidelong, away from the cleared track and into a
thick-set brake of jagged thorns and thongs of rusted metal.

The gently ironic attitude towards life offers no complete
solution of the practical problem set by a vicious and terrified
mule wallowing and plunging in an unbreakable net that
spurs it wherever it presses. Victor, thinking of fallen horses
in England, encouraged the beast to rise of itself. But this
much it was attempting already. It writhed and strained
like a cat that resents being held, and each kick or wriggle
involved it only the more completely.

Word was passed up to the guide that the rear was no
longer in touch. The scout halted the column and questions

270 ROUGH JUSTICE

and curses floated back westward, followed by the scout
himself, a masterful lance-corporal. “ ’As some bloody
swab gone an’ thrown down ’is mule? ” he asked bitterly.
“You, there!” he called to one of the men, “’old them
three mules.” This liberated McGurk, Booker and
Ruthven to serve as a breakdown gang. “ You three,” he
said to them, “ an’ you, ya bleeder wot’s done it,” he added
to Victor, “ git dahn to it an’ extricyte.”

The scout himself took a seat on the frantic mule’s head,
brought a pair of nippers out of his pocket and began to cut
away the strands of wire within his reach. The others held
the beast down, leg by leg, under his orders, and then took
turns to sit on its head while the scout went over the whole
entanglement with his nippers. At intervals the mule broke
into wild spasms of renewed endeavour to work out its own
deliverance from its couch of thorns, and the men wrestled
with it furiously, four of them snarling and swearing: “Garn,
ya Weedin’ bastard, lay still!” “ Y’owld man-aitin’ tiger,
hittin’ the moon wi’ yer heels.” “ The Lorrd blast the
pairvairsity o’ these illegeetimate deevils ! ” Victor, in silence
and bitterness, worked with the rest.

“ Was the Beak swearin’ at all? ” McGurk asked Ruthven
in a whisper, as soon as the whole caravan was again in
motion.

“ Not a damn that I hairrd,” Ruthven replied.

“ Nor I. Ut isn’t natur’l. The lad’s gettin’ quare.”

“ Is that,” Ruthven asked, “ why ye’re leadin’ the rogue
mule they got him from Hell? ”

“ It is not,” said McGurk. “ The haste’s quiet. Wid
all the holes he has in him he’s too dejicted to offer to
bite ye.”

Victor caught his own name. So! They were talking
about him? He thought “ How could they not be? ” Had
he not mulled his first job at the front? In the catch-as-

BOOK SIX

271

catch-can wrestle in the slime between the five men and the
tortured mule, he knew the others ha l held on more dourly
than he and had taken more risks fn m the madly lunging
heels of the beast. And then, like sc me passive creature, a
child or sick person, he had let McGu k exchange mules and
give Victor the meekest of the race. He trailed along, a
battered mind in a quelled body, almost led by the meek mule.

Ill

By midnight the three fatigue parties were back in the
cellars at Pully-la-Fosse; and under each man’s belt two
spoonfuls of neat rum, measured out by Fulford with scrupu-
lous justice, were doing their kindly office. Victor, dead
beat in body but snug in a warm nest of thought, could now
appreciate with a luxurious glow of self-pity the tragic appeal
of his case. Something or other was fearfully wrong:
something had defrauded him: that journey to-night should
have been like some wild adventure with strange hazards
under the moon, in Scott or Dumas; the tussle with the
frenzied mule in the cactus thicket of wire ought to have
had the fantastic, transfigured horror of one of Victor Hugo’s
fine freaks of macabre invention. This sordid, brutalising
life was no honest substitute for that glamorous life of the
thrilled imagination, the passionate heart and the unjaded
body — the true life of war, the real historic thing, known
and attested by all generations, the splendour and gloom of
old battles in the Peninsula and of Marlborough’s Low
Country campaigns and of the fatal night falling on thronged
and surrounded Sedan. In these stinking cellars and out on
these blasted heaths there was only the letter of glorious war
without its spirit, only the dry bones of gallant enterprise, not
its breath and complexion. He was profoundly moved by
this sight of himself as the most tragic of all heroes — a man
who had somehow strayed into an out-of-gear world where

272 ROUGH JUSTICE

causes were cheated of their effects, and great and noble
things were no longer their true selves and all grandeur was
forfeit, and reality’s self was drained dry of its essence, and
sorry counterfeits had taken the place of the authentic
springs of beauty and joy. O, it was very good rum, the
best that was then to be bought in the whole world.

IV

Reverie passed into dreaming and did not quite cease till
Fulford came walking and stooping along the dark under-
ground gallery at Reveille, to give out the day’s orders:
breakfast in half an hour; then a platoon rifle inspection;
then all of Number One Section to fall in for another fatigue
— hand-grenades to be carried up to the front.

As all Victor’s niovements were lifeless, his rifle was only
half-clean when little Mellett, with Fulford behind him,
came round to inspect. He looked down the unshining
barrel and said, rather reproachfully, “ No credit, that, to
your officer.” Then he passed on and left Victor hating
his clemency. Why the Hell, Victor sourly wondered, was
he not punished? Oh, he supposed, Mellett was making
allowance; Mellett was tempering the wind; Mellett was
listing him as one of the crocks who had to be pulled through
by not asking too much of them. Horrible notion! Victor
brooded over it while he hobbled away from the inspection
parade to fall in for the fatigue.

The men’s loads were not crushing, for men strong and
fit — half a sackful apiece of boxes of Mills bombs, to be
carried by each man the best way he could. Where the
mule party had left the high road, the daylight party entered
a slit cut in the road’s high eastern bank. It was the rear-
ward end of a long and deep communication trench. In all
of it there was some water to splash through: half a mile
of it was flooded three feet deep. Along its centre ran a

BOOK SIX

273

narrow and slippery strip of submerg ed duck-board. Any
man who slipped off this and chancec on one of the many
holes in the clay bed of the trench m ght sink in up to his
armpits. Victor did this twice. At . third stumble he fell
altogether and was for a moment rig it under water. His
cap was retrieved and wrung out 1 v Smythe; McGurk
carried Victor’s fardel of bombs while Victor wrung out his
own tunic.

By three o’clock in the afternoon rhey were back in the
cellars. Victor flopped down on the straw, wet and cold
might go hang: he must sleep, onh sleep. He did, for
half an hour; and then he was awaked by his chattering
teeth and the qualmish chill of the wet clothes round his
stomach and chest. He found Cart was inspecting him
solemnly. “ Tike orf yer trahsies an’ pents an’ yer shirt,”
Cart advised him. “ Shove ’em in the strawr, under yer.
Thet’ll dry ’em. Then you lay where y’are an’ curl yer
legs up inside o’yer gritecowt. Thet’ll warm yer.”

Victor did it. The Corporal laid his own greatcoat on
the top of the little pile of Victor and his belongings. Victor
was thawing out well when tea came from the cookers,
glorious and hot. If only a whole day’s rest could have
come, Victor might have weathered the vexed promontory
beyond which the stolidly enduring soldier’s body and
spirit find that weary vessels can just struggle on, just
afloat.

But circumstances had not that kindness. Fulford had
dished out every one’s tea except his own when he was
abruptly called away: new orders had come and he must go
round at once and give them out in all the billets. The
Company was to have moved up into the front line the next
day. But Intelligence thought that word had got round to
the enemy of the exact day and hour of this intended relief.
So it had to be changed, lest the enemy should bombard the

T

274 ROUGH JUSTICE

front trench at the critical moment of the relief, when the
trench would be thronged with both the relieved and the
relievers. Accordingly A Company was to pack up and
start for the firing-line within half an hour. The men
gobbled their tea and made ready to go. They were all
tired, but what did it matter? At last they were going, as
fighting men, into the line. They had long lived for this;
now they revived for it.

Victor found that he could just stand up, under his pack
and equipment, and stump along stiffly to where the Com-
pany was to fall in, on the safe west side of a row of half-
ruined houses. Eighty pounds had become an incredibly
heavier load within the last week. A loose kerb-stone lay
in his path as he plodded along: he lifted a foot carefully
high to step over its three or four vertical inches of stumbling-
block.

V

Drugged as he was with weariness, Victor was carried by
soldier habit through the motions of falling in, numbering
off and stepping out with the rest. The next thing he felt
was a sudden jog and a bewilderment. Capel was pulling
him by the arm. “ Come round at the curves, old son,”
Capel, the tenor, was saying with a queer gaiety. “ Curves
o’ beauty, you know; curves o’ beauty,” Capel maundered
on, strangely.

Everything was strange. “ I must have been asleep,”
thought Victor. Yes, he had read in Napier’s Penin-
sular War — was it not there? — how men would sleep on
the march — ^and sometimes march straight on, at a bend in
a road, and go into the ditch. He thought he could even
remember where he had read that — in his old room at
Skimmery, with the lamp burning steady and the firelight
leaping a little, and a tide of exultant fortitude, sympathetic
fortitude, high in his own heart. Oh, confound I Capel

BOOK SIX 275

was tugging his arm again. He roMsed himself more and
looked round and tried to make everything out.

The Company had marched off i ito the east in the last
flush of sunset. The road they wer ; taking lay broad and
white between derelict fields. It l;ad none of the usual
roadside poplars of France to screen .ny daylight movement
upon it. So A Company ought, str ctly, to have marched
by sections, with fifty yards or more between each and the
next, to limit the kill of any enemy shell that might pitch
on the road. But that would have meant a little delay in
arrival. And they had been warned not to be late. And
Black had not had one loss yet to make him the Rachel
that every good Company officer is in a war, mourning the
sons that he might not have lost if he had done something
or other not quite as he did. So the only precaution he
took was to march his men in file instead of fours. This
had brought Victor next to Capel in the rear file of Number
One Section.

Capel was talking more oddly than ever — out of some
state of beatitude, as it seemed. “ We’ve rolled the pitch,”
he was saying, “ till we were tired, and slaved away at the
nets, and trained and fielded, and now, by God, we’re going
in.” For the first time he was speaking like a man wholly
at ease and not consciously worsted and shamed. Every-
body in the Section knew his record — how he had seemed,
a year or two since, to stand at the opening door of success
as an operatic tenor, and how, one night, when the King
and Queen were to be in the house, he had taken just the
least drop too much, to make sure of his nerves, and the
King and Queen had seen and had got up from their chairs
and left the theatre, and how the luckless son of the morning
had not retrieved that first slip from his first footing in heaven.
But to-night he was no blurred and ineffectual copy of a
man, but radiant, strong and complete as his own singing

276 ROUGH JUSTICE

voice, which had always seemed so full and round and
ringing with the puissant wholeness of virility.

A clap that was more of a thud — it was so big and yet
muted — came from somewhere out in the blasted fields on
their right. “ An honest effort,” Capel said jocundly, with
his eyes all a-sparkle. He pointed to where a black hay-
stack, with a heavy list to leeward, was rising, expanding
and drifting away as a less densely black cloud. Then a
sound like calico tearing began in the distance, approached
in a great hurry, and ended abruptly in just such another
thud and rising black haystack, about as far out on their
left as the first had been on their right.

Capel was exulting. “ Baptism of fire. ‘ Power and
strength to have victory.’ ” His voice had both triumph
and peace in it — a kind of ecstatic blessedness of arrival.

Captain Black came running back from the head of the
column. “ Step out, men,” he commanded, with trouble in
his voice. Near Victor he spoke low to Mellett. “ Keep
your men moving. That bloody gunner’s bracketing on
us.” He ran on towards the rear, to make the two rear
platoons double past the bad spot on the road, section by
section.

Somewhere, no doubt, a tiny thing like a dead leaf blown
about the violet depths of the sky had been watching them,
with its tale-bearing voice prompting some German battery
commander who sat before a big table and, now that twilight
was come, cast the glare of his flash-lamp about a big map.
Fired from far north, the first of the two ranging shells had
overshot the road by a neat hundred yards; the second had
pitched a neat hundred short of it. No great arithmetical
genius was required to drop a third shell just half-way
between these two.

It pitched right in the middle of Number Two Section.
So the burst was somewhere behind Victor’s back. But he

BOOK SIX

277

saw it as you see a strong flash of lightning, whichever way
you may be looking: the great spLish of flame filled the
whole field of vision. A rush of ho? air pushed against the
back of his neck; and then the flarie was gone and night
had suddenly come, where only tw light had been — night
turbid with an acrid-smelling smoke ind speckled with black
objects, incredible objects — rifles, lu ips of earth, blocks of
stone sett, whole men, bits of men, all falling through the air.

One of the harder of these falling t dngs must have fetched
Victor a blow on the head and knocked him out of his
senses. When he became conscious again he was lying,
face down, on the road, in a world that had changed a great
deal. There were no marching men before, beside or
behind him; no tremendous imperative in him and round
him was forcing him on, step by step; there was no sound
about him except the old sleepy rumble of distant guns and,
near and anxious and urgent, a weak imploring voice, “ O
Christ, pity her.” Victor knew the voice for that of Bill
Haines, of Number Two Section, a little milkman from
Sunbury — a man always unconcealably worried by fears for
his wife, who was doing his work as well as her own since
he enlisted; he had told Auberon she was “ expecting.”

Victor turned a little, with an effort, so that his right
cheek lay in the mud, instead of his nose. A big moon that
had long been high in the sky had now brightened. Its
light leaping out from behind rags of fast-moving cloud
showed Haines half-naked and disembowelled; as moonlight
shines on a lake, it shone on what was lying spilt on the road
in front of Haines’ belly and attached to it.

“Haines!” Victor called, and then “Bill!” which he
had never called Haines before.

But Haines, too, was speaking and getting no answer.
“O Christ, be kind to her! O, suffering Christ, think of
her!” So he went on entreating the winter sky till his

278 ROUGH JUSTICE

voice weakened down to a mumble and stopped. Victor
had shut his eyes again, thinking: “ Am I, too, like that?
When I move, shall I feel a warm trickle running down
inside my clothes? ” He did not move. If he was a mere
fragment now, a man drawn and quartered alive, he could
still put off knowing it, just for that moment.

A rhythmical distant tramp rose on his ear while he lay;
it approached; an order was shouted: “Keep in to the left
there ! ” and a column of troops came edging past the muddle
of abattoir refuse in which he lay. Some of the marching
men gave little grunts or snorts, like scared horses; the
breath of others was laboured or held; they were raw troops
and had not learned to take one of these little messes as if it
were only the spill of feathers or baby fur left on the grass
by a hawk. A boy’s voice that tried to sound jolly and
hard sang out, “Get on there, men. They’re dead as
mutton. You there, carry on marching”; some man had
fallen out to vomit.

That must be C Company, going up to join A. All of
it passed: the tramp of the rear platoon died away to the
east, up the road. He had kept dead still all the time, lying
half in the ditch and half on the road, as he had fallen.
Why? He was not sure. Partly, perhaps, from some decent
impulse not to bleat about his plight to people with bigger
work in hand than to look after him. Partly from a re-
luctance, in the flesh or in the soul, to relinquish its suddenly
gotten place of rest, its retreat from all the broil and bale
that might come back when once bodily motion returned.
“ Dead as mutton ” — let it go at that; let everything go,
just for the moment He fell fast asleep,

VI

He awoke with his teeth chattering uncontrollably. Rain
must have fallen; his clothes were soaked; they cased him

BOOK SIX

279

in iciness; paroxysms of shuddering ’^an through his limbs,
trunk and jaws, in a kind of convi.lsive wave. Was he
dying of cold? Or — why, it might be loss of blood ; he
had never found out whether his sore body was whole or a
stump or a botched remnant of smashc 1 bones and perforated
entrails. One of his hands tickled a little; he felt it with
the other. Yes, tepid drops were run ling over it. Not his
own blood, though. Groping about, his hand touched an-
other hand, then grasped it, and lo! the other hand came
away with no arm or body behind it — mst a loose hand, with
six inches of wrist, and with a big ring on one finger, lying
on the road. Still, the hand was not his: that was all right.
Cautiously feeling his limbs and trunk, he made sure he was
complete; he could not find even a wound.

He half rose on one elbow and took a look round. For
the moment the moon was a bright island in a ragged-shored
lake of clear sky. It shone on the sweat of Bill Haines’
upturned face, with its bulging eyes and dropped jaw,
already stiff, and on Capel’s body, no way mutilated or
bloody, only limp and forlorn like that of a mouse kicked
to death in the dust.

With a struggle Victor rose to his feet Yes, he could
stand all right; he was weak and shaky; still, he could
stand. And then he found, with horror, that he had been
half wishing he couldn’t. How would it look if he were
found loitering here, unhurt, and telling a pretty yarn about
how he had fainted on the way up to the front? Had not
men been shot for less? And that lying still of his, when
C Company passed — was it not really an act of malingering?
What on' earth was he to do? He tried to think, but his
terrified mind, fretting in his tired body, only worked itself
up to new frenzies of panic. But he must think, he must
frame some plan of action; and, to do that, he must get
away first, if only for a few minutes, from this bullying and

28 o rough justice

quelling cold that took all the pluck and the wits out of a
man. But how to do it? — how to do it?

At the height of his distress a new sound reached him.
More marching feet — from the west like the others, but
this time only a small body of men. A Provost-Sergeant’s
party? — out gleaning deserters? The very thought threw
him into mad panic. He plunged away from the road,
forgetting even his rifle, scrambled on all fours across the
hedgeless ditch and staggered weakly out into the scarred
waste of weeds, stooping as low as he could, just to be out
of sight for a few minutes, only a few minutes, just to make
up his mind what to say.

He had hardly staggered thirty yards when he stumbled,
head foremost, into an old shell-hole, half-full of water.
The new terror he. felt, lest the splash he made should be
heard, assured him more crushingly than anything yet that
he was a criminal now, who could live on, like vermin, only
by not letting any one see, hear or smell them. Making
a mighty effort with his spent muscles, he drew himself
cautiously out of the cold water, dragged himself up the
hole’s slimy clay slope and peered over its lip. He found
that he was doing all this with a furtive animal cunning, a
rat’s or a beetle’s, that he had never known himself to
possess: he loathed it while he used it. He peered towards
the road; he put a hand to his ear.

The marching party halted, to his terror, just where he
had left the road. Something wooden, that only made a
slight noise, was put down; there were irregular footfalls,
no longer in step, grumbles and grunts of distaste, then a few
audible words.

** ’Ere’s an ’ole one, Puddin’. Warm, ’e is.”

“ Warm! Ya silly swine! ’E’s offed it more’n an hour.”

Pudding, Pudding? Why, that was the nickname of Punt,
who used to bang the big drum of the Comfies’ band until

BOOK SIX 281

active service stilled its music and turned all the bandsmen

into stretcher-bearers. Why, of course . There were

voices again. “Gawd, if they ain’t gutted Bill ’Aines!”
“’Im that ’ad a lot o’ chat about ’is nissus? ” “No more
little ’alf-pints along o’ Bill ’Aines.”

Victor almost shouted, almost ru hed forward to join
them. Then he delayed a moment longer. He was not
sure of them. Would they say they h td found him skulking
about in the rear of the line, just w ien his Company had
gone in? You see, he did not know them — had never really
fraternised with his fellows — not even enough to know that
all privates are tacitly leagued together to avert from any one
of themselves the major severities of the law — no more than
he knew how courts-martial, for all their grim looks, will
struggle until the going down of the sun to find some excuse
for the poor brother-in-arms who has failed. And just then
the voices dropped rather queerly, became confidential, with
ugly chuckling guffaws and an audible word now and then —
“ ticker ” and “ ring ” among others, and then an admiring
exclamation, Ya bloody ol’ robber! Pinchin’ it orf a loose
’and! ”

“ ‘ Pity to wyste it.’ ” Pudding’s voice brazenly hummed
the refrain of a music-hall song in honour of taking a chance
to steal whenever you got it.

“ They’re robbing the dead,” Victor thought, remember-
ing the ring on that stray hand. “The brutes! The
beasts! I suppose they’d murder me if they knew I had
heard.” To the man who had lived remote from real life
and from common men it did not occur that these comrades
of his were doing their duty substantially well all the time,
and that if shells had been falling around they would have
gone on with it still, stoical, ribald, good-natured and grace-
less, pilferers and heroes. Whilst he shrank back into his
shell-hole in fastidious horror he dimly heard the bearers

282

ROUGH JUSTICE

grunting filthy conjunctions with the name of Christ as the
weights of the loaded stretchers came on their shoulders.
A slovenly order to march was given, and soon the last
diminishing sound of the plodding boots died out in the West.
Cape! and Haines and a dozen others had gone back the way
that they came, and the tensity of Victor’s fear could relax
enough to let him feel all the chill that was deadening his

He supposed that it was the final ebb beginning : before
dawn he would be lying just where he was now, but with his
mouth rigidly a-gape like that of Haines — dead of exposure,
nabbed by God in the act of deserting — that was how it
would look. No; that was too dreadful. He struggled to
his feet and stared round. In the cast the line of the front
was marked by an* endless succession of rocket-like lights.
In the west and the south was absolute darkness. But in
the north there was something amazing. Not more, it
seemed, than 400 yards off, a light burned dull but steady.
It had irregular edges; it looked turbid — ^just like the light
of some window screened with ragged curtain stuff or sacking,
perhaps with one candle within.

A window? A house, a fire perhaps, possibly wine, and
dry straw to lie on, and time to think out the right thing to
do, like a man and not a frozen wormj^ The vision of that
modest heaven revived him and drew him along, excited and
breathless. “ Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom.”
He was weak and fell twice, and could hardly get up with
the weight of the water in his clothes added to his seventy
pounds of equipment and ammunition. But he rose each
time and went stumbling and shambling along through the
deep weeds of the bogged fields, seeking the light, like some
queer clodhopping moth.

CHAPTER XX

I

V ICTOR struck against a low wooden fence as he
drew near the light. He made out the dark bulk of
a house, framing the one lig ited window. The
outline of the house was dim against s)me other and larger
dark bulk behind it and east of it — 1 \ e clifF-like side, as it
seemed, of some great quarry. Ah! that, no doubt, was
why this one house was not smashed by enemy shells: it
was screened.

By feel he found a gate in the fence and entered a farm-
yard; so much he knew by the stink and warm sweat of
the dung-heap piled in the centre. He waded carefully
through the puddles of ooze from the dung, lest he fall,
reached the lighted window, felt about with his hands on
the wall till he hit on a door, and knocked, very gently, so
as to cause no alarm. Nothing happened. So he knocked
more and more loudly, listening hard between each knock
and the next. Nobody came to the door, but at last a dulled
voice called, in French, “ Come in,” and he pressed down
the latch.

The door let him into a little square room with a very
hot iron stove and a lamp. That room was a sheer cube of
heat and light, a veritable hoard of the good contraband stuff
that was first run by Prometheus. In it a woman of,
perhaps, thirty or so was working alone and absorbedly at
some laundrying job. At Victor’s entry and salutation she
merely stared for a moment without any expression of
welcome, surprise, alarm, or anything else, and then went on
with her work, as an English labourer’s wife might do if the
cat had come in.

Might he sit down for a minute or two, Victor asked
courteously, in his immaculate French, She pointed, with-

*83

284 ROUGH JUSTICE

out cordiality, to a chair by the stove, and he flopped into it,
collapsing into himself like a sack half full of apples. The
chair was hard, but it had arms — divine things, arms to a
chair — ^and a low back; his pack could rest on the back,
with its murderous weight off his shoulders. And oh! it
was warm by that fire; it brought life back; it turned each
moment into a separate pearl on a lengthening string of
felicity. The heat and rest drugged him at once; his
eyelids were pulled down like blinds drawn with strings.
But to sleep there would be rude: besides, he mustn’t stay
long — only just long enough to compose himself for his
return to his own difficult world. While he tried to hold
his eyes open he gazed musingly at the taciturn woman.

She was a woman of large make, a figure of ripe, em-
browned force and fertility such as sculptors model to sym-
bolise Asia or Earth. Her features were large and well
formed; the face, as a whole, inanimate, like a fine bronze
lamp unlit Her shape was the wonder. Over its Junonian
splendour of contour her worn peasant dress ran loose or
tight here and there as if to illustrate some cruel jibe at the
vulgar and impotent feminine forms that cheap wholesale
clothing has to be made for.

Victor’s drowsily glazing eyes may have rested on her
long enough to make some patch of her conscious, as a
weak burning-glass will. She paused in her work, stared at
him harshly, and then came over and opened a little door in
the iron case of the stove. Through the aperture there
burst a jet of fiery horizontal light, full on Victor’s fece,
showing up fiercely its pallor and exhaustion and its in-
defeasible beauty.

He said, “Thank you, Madame”; at first he had called
her Mademoiselle, but had seen her ring in the light from
the stove. She did not answer. She had gone back to her
work in the more shadowy half of the room. Oh! the

BOOK SIX

285

endless work of these country womei in France! — Victor
mused on it as his waking consciousness sank under the
opiate glow from the stove; a dulling, killing life to use up
creatures like this statue- woman with, her big classic face
formed to express great emotions and \ et as void and dreary
as any great theatre when it is empty, the tragedy over, the
lights out, the whole cavernous house left to the spiders and
the night watchman. Oh! good G )d! — what hand was
that on his shoulder? He had awakec with a start from his
doze.

Some one— oh 1 that woman, of couf-se — was undoing one
of his shoulder-strap buttons, and easing the straps of his
pack off his shoulders. He shifted himself a little, to concur
with her movements. From her standing height she looked
down at his face, with an air of distaste, and then poured a
little milk into a saucepan, put it to boil on the fire, and
brought out a packet of coffee, doing it all like a person who
feels “ Well, I suppose I have got to.” When the coffee
was made she said “ Drink,” and gave him a little bowlful,
as if he were a child that nobody wanted but some one or
other must keep alive somehow.

“Oh, thank you. You’re good,” Victor said weakly, in
his good French.

While he drank she surveyed him, always with the same
hard, incurious aspect.

The hot, weak coffee finished the work of the fire.
Tight strings seemed to be loosening themselves luxuriously
through all his thawed, comatose body. He was less able
to exert himself than ever, and yet he was better; he could
think better; he could call up lost joys more clearly.
Why, there were beds still in the world: just think of a
bed!

“Tired, tired, tired,” his voice began to dribble like a
child’s, uncontrollably.

286

ROUGH JUSTICE

“ Must rest,” the woman said curtly, in her clipped
French. ‘‘ Must go to bed now.”

II

Bed ! That miraculous word ! But he could almost have
cried at her uncompassionate voice. To over-tired children
an ungentle nurse seems terribly hard. He struggled to
rise, failed; tried again, and sank back in his chair with a
little groan. He had become incredibly weak.

“Wait!” she said, with just the slightest abatement of
her coldness. “ I help you.” She stooped, bent her bare
left arm round his waist, gripped hard, and lifted. She was
amazingly strong. “ Walk,” she said, and he shuffled on,
feebly, almost lifted off the ground.

“ But you are wet,” she suddenly said: the wet back of
his tunic must have felt cold to her fore-arm.

“ I fell into the water,” he said humbly.

“ Go slowly,” she said, a little more gently. “ I support
you.” She took up the lamp in her unemployed hand and
they moved slowly along a low tunnel-like passage towards
the back of the house. At its end she pushed a door open
with her foot. The lamplight showed a damp-walled room,
some ten feet square, nearly half filled with a damp, sodden-
looking bed, its surface much sunken in the middle. But it
was a bed.

She lowered him till he could sit on its edge. Then she
stood and surveyed him once more. “ You are a soldier by
trade? ” she asked.

“ No, Madame,” he said. “ An amateur only.”

“ A volunteer? ”

“ Yes.”

“ Were you so poor? ”

He shrugged feebly. “ That depends,” he said.

But she was a ferocious realist. “ Had you got,” she

BOOK SIX 287

said in a voice that was like a stamp of impatience at such
affectations, “ enough money to keep vou alive? ”

“ Yes,” he admitted.

‘‘ And yet you volunteered? ”

“ Yes.”

“My God!” she said. “What an imbecility!” No
blast of contempt quite so direct had ever scorched Victor.
She lit him a candle and went out er ct, lamp in hand, like
a painted figure of one of the Fates “ Put your clothes
outside the door,” she ordered, before disappearing. “ They
must be dried. Remember it.”

He took off his puttees and boots by prolonged efforts,
fumbled and slid more easily out of tunic, socks, Cardigan
jacket and slacks, laid them all outside the door, and slipped
into bed in his two undergarments; the heat of the fire had
nearly dried them in front. If only the bedclothes were
thick! And they were; he glowed already. A dreamful
exaltation possessed him. Why had there never been lyrics
about beds as well as roses and wine? Oh, the dull fools
that we had been in our old years of ease, to take as mere
matters of course these exquisite heirlooms handed down to
us by the sane, brooding ingenuity of all the generations —
we that gushed over the little contraptions of beavers and
wrens! Or did some people have this power already — of
seeing old and plain things in all the beauty and wonderful-
ness that they had had when they were new? Had poor
old Bron got a touch of it — Bron, who had such comical
ways of putting forth his elementary mind upon the most
commonplace things with a perpetually renewed delight and
affection and even a kind of ingenuous surprise?

So, for a few minutes, Victor’s brain worked excitedly,
till he fell into some sort of sleep and awoke an hour after-
wards, furiously hot and yet with a shiver on him and longing
for more heat, nothing but heat. He put his head under

288 ROUGH JUSTICE

the clothes and tucked them in tightly round it; he felt
exultantly cunning, like one shrewdly shutting out enemies.
All life had contracted into a passionate sense of that glowing
cavity where he lay curled up in the dark, with all the world’s
evils outside.

He slept again and awoke wondering where he could be.
He got out of bed, to make sure, felt his knees failing him
absurdly, and tottered back to the bed and sat on its edge, to
think. But almost at once he was horribly cold, so he got
into bed again and lay shuddering, with his head under the
clothes, using his hot breath to warm up the bed again.
Heat — he must have heat. Perhaps he had ague or some
sort of fever: heat was the thing for it.

Time after time he crossed and recrossed the vague
frontier between feverish musing and feverish dream. At
one of these half-awakings he had an impression that a
square piece of greyness had opened itself in the dark; at
another, that the grey of the square was growing darker;
at another, that it was gone. The next time he awoke his
skin was cool and his head clear: he felt strangely well, and
looked round, quite alive now. The square was growing
lighter again. Why, the thing was a window, blenching at
dawn, and — Oh, good God! this was the second time it had
done that — he had been here two nights, an absentee from
duty, without leave. There was not a moment to waste.
He jumped up.

Ill

He found his legs weak: you do not bake or sweat a
touch of fatigue fever out of your body for thirty hours on
end without paying some price for it Still, he must act, or
be lost. Moving slowly he got to the window and drew
back the blind.

Frost had returned; a cold pallor lay over the dreary
fields, and a kind of rigor mortis held the mud; a starved

BOOK SIX

289

robin, hopping hopelessly about outsit :e, threw obliquely at
Victor the lonely sparkle of its eye, in desperate petition.
He was curiously moved by this oth t creature in trouble
and deadly danger: he turned, to get the crumbs of ration
biscuit in his tunic-pocket. His un form was not there.
Oh, of course, it would be at the door. He hastily opened
the door. No, it was not there, but some other clothes
were — a coat and trousers such as I rench farm-labourers
wore. They looked enigmatic, lyir g there in the dark
passage.

He turned to the window again. T he robin was gone, in
despair of bounty. Without that one spark of sentient flesh
warmed with blood, the petrified landscape looked still more
sinister than ever. He looked out at it shudderingly, as
though at some pitiless beast.

While he stared, a knock came at the door. He got into
bed, for decency’s sake, and then shouted in French:
“ Madame, my uniform, please.” The knock came again,
louder. He called out, “ Come in.”

The statue-woman came in. She had the clothes on her
arm that Victor had seen at the door. “ You are better? ”
she asked, with all her original austerity. “ You are able
to dress yourself? ”

“ Yes, yes, Madame — ^a thousand thanks,” Victor replied.
“ Only — my uniform. I rejoin my comrades.”

“ There has been,” she said, “ a misfortune.”

“ Yes, but my uniform,” Victor importuned.

“ Accidents happen,” she said, like some one doggedly
meeting an accusation.

“ An accident? ” Victor’s voice had become sharp with
fear.

“ I left them to dry,” she doggedly said. “ The stove
door was open. A red-hot coal must have fallen.”

He half rose in bed, “ My God! You don’t mean ”

V

290 ROUGH JUSTICE

“ Yes,” she said. “ All burnt — completely.” He threw
his head back on the pillow distractedly. “ Cannot accidents
happen? ” she added, almost with animosity.

Victor groaned. He could see it in print: “ The accused
was found behind the lines two days later, wearing French
civilian clothing.” Terrified, hustled, bewildered, his mind
felt about for a plan — any sort of plan. The woman was
putting the mufti clothes down on the bed, over his feet. Of
only one thing was he sure — that he would never put on
that loathsome and deadly disguise; the thought of walking
up, in the livery of desertion, to any British soldier at ease
in his honourable garb — that was too frightful. “ Pardon,
Madame,” he said at last. “ I am in danger. I beg your
help — ^an addition to all your infinite goodness to me. I
must write to my. officer, now, at once. Could you, in
your great kindness, get my letter delivered? ”

She broke out in scornful derision. Delivered! She,
alone on the farm, get a letter delivered! Delivered where?

He explained. In the trenches. Not four kilometres
away. To an officer there — or a man — any soldier would
take it and know what to do.

She hooted at the idea. “ Y es, and be shot for a spy,
like old Pierre Lafitte that tried to sell eggs to the English.
Shot! Like a Prussian! ”

As soon as the torrent lulled for a moment, Victor said,
“ Then I must go, Madame, instantly, as I am.”

She changed suddenly. “ Give me the letter,” she said,
“ I will deliver it.”

“ How good you are! ” he said fervently.

She rummaged out pen, ink and paper. He wrote down
the whole of his mischance with intense veracity, nerving
himself to refrain from making his case a shade more specious
than the truth. He would trust English justice. Captain
Black was a man of honour and kindness; Black would

BOOK SIX

291

believe him; Black would see him through. He addressed
the letter to Black.

When the woman came to take it he put some food near
him and said, “ Stay you there, quietly.” She picked up the
trousers and coat she had left on t: e bed. “ They only
smother your feet,” she said, and she 'ook them away,

IV

Except the everlasting mumble of guns, the only sounds
that reached Victor, through all the few hours of light on
that day, were the continuous wail ot some imprisoned calf,
the quarrelsome squeals of a starving litter of pigs and, now
and then, the terrified or angry squeaking of the lean house-
hold’s mice. Dusk was already thick when the woman
re-entered his room.

She looked moroser than ever. Her face darkened at
anything like a question from Victor. The letter? De-
livered? Why, what else? For what had she gone out but
that, on this dog of a day? What God could have made
such a day?

“ Le bon dieu Boche, Madame, sans doute.” Victor
tried to be nice to her. Was it the Captain himself, he
ventured to ask, who had taken the letter into his hand?

“ Naturally,” she said, in a defensive way. ‘‘ Did you
not write the address? ” She put down his evening food
and went out abruptly. All the rest of the evening the only
signs he got of her being alive in the place were little noises
of house- work and, once, tumultuous sounds of joy from the
little pigs and a short pause in the lament of the calf. She
must have been feeding the beasts in the dark.

The next day was, to Victor’s consternation, dead blank.
No escort came to clothe him and take him away, prisoner
or free. Just when his third dawn in the place began to
grow grisly he was awaked by a distant sound of machine-

292 ROUGH JUSTICE

gun firing — first, little pouting flings of it, then long runs of
its woodpecker taps, many guns tapping together, their dotted
lines of sound overlapping each other. The flurry died
down in an hour and then another day of torment dragged
itself almost soundlessly through. Each day was worse than
the last; he was growing strong with the rest and the food;
he had lost the battered body’s forlorn consolation of falling
back on its most elementary self in an absorbed passion of
abandonment to warmth and rest after exposure and toil.

Every time the woman brought him food he “ fished ” as
much as he dared. How had the Captain looked, on re-
ceiving the letter? Had he opened it instantly? Had he
asked any questions? Or had some one else taken the letter,
to give to the Captain? No good. At any new question
the woman seemed to throw herself upon guard: she froze
fast, and Victor, anxious to bring on a thaw, would try to
cover up his offence with solicitous courtesies. Had she no
fear, he asked, of living there, with shells falling so near?

“ I am not in the habit,” she said, “ of changing house.”
And then, as if in rage at his unreason, “ I have only this
farm. Can I take it away? The land and the beasts and
the buildings? ”

He winced. “ Y our husband, Madame — ? ” he began
at another of these conversational crises.

“ Killed,” she said, with no trace of conventional sorrow.

“Ah!” he said, with his line civilised note of delicate
sympathy.

“ Bah! ” She blew the sentimental stuff away like fluff.
“ He was an idiot. Not a maniac. Imbecile only — since
a year before the war. A year after our marriage.”

“ And yet he fought, Madame? ”

“ No. He was exempt because he was an idiot. I have
his exemption papers here in the house.”

She looked at Victor hard — he couldn’t tell why. God

BOOK SIX

293

alone knew why she did everything she did — so he thought.
“ And yet he fell, Madame? ” he murnured sympathetically,
in spite of discouragements.

“ He was minding the beasts,” sh 3 said, “ over there.”
She waved an Amazonian arm towar s the south, “ I had
sent him. A big shell buried him alis^e. It chanced I was
looking*, at one moment I saw him, and the next moment
he was up a little way in the air, feer first; he was a black
thing among white smoke. When I .rrived, there was only
the hole and the mound of earth rour.d it. I knew that he
must be somewhere under the earth. Happily he had no
money on him. I always made him leave his coat in the
house, with his money in it and his certificate of imbecility
— all his papers. Nobody knows, except I, that he is
dead.”

Victor might have shuddered had his manners been less
good. He imagined that husband. Poor devil! A half-
witted serf on the farm of the wife whose magnificent
womanhood he had disappointed. Magnificent it was; no
denying it. Untender and pitiless as this childless woman
might be, yet she was super-feminine, too; a very statue of
sex, heroic size; deep-bosomed, puissant-loined, with the
full eyes and lips of unspilt youth and of sensuous vehemence.
She might have been the foundress of some strapping race
of soldiers, settlers and plough-driving, horse-quelling women
fit to be their mates.

“ And you, who ask questions,” she said. “ Are you
married? ”

“ No.”

She said “ Ah! ” in a way that might have meant any
one of three or four things: at least, so it seemed then to her
super-civilised hearer. To him, with his expectations of
delicate indirectness in human speech, she was a sphinx just
because she had no secret about her at all; she was like a

294 ROUGH JUSTICE

horse or a dog whose enigmatic-looking eyes, with nothing
but elementary desires and fears behind them, will set you
riddles of your own making, if riddles are in your line.

V

When a fourth day — nine hours of mere misty pallor —
was running out and the woman brought Victor’s supper,
she said, “ Your battalion is gone.” She said it brusquely,
almost spitefully, as children say, “ So there! ”

Victor sat up with a gasp. “ Gone! Where? ”

“ God knows. They were attacked by the Prussians.”

“ Yesterday morning? ” Victor remembered that gunning
at dawn.

“You seem to know more than I,” she said, and shut
her mouth tight.

He importuned: “Tell me, Madame, for the love of
God!”

She made him entreat a little, and then relented a little.
“ I hear they drove the enemy back. They lost many men.
So they were relieved.”

He wrung his hands without knowing that he did it. He
felt, once more, that the curse had never fallen on him till
now. Comrades had given their proofs while he had lain
here. “ Go, hang yourself, brave Crillon. We fought at
Arques, and you were not there ” — he thought of the
blistering words that greeted the laggard in war. “ You
are sure,” he asked, “ that my letter was rightly delivered? ”

“No! ” She looked him full in the face, as if she dis-
dained further lying. “ A has les masques! ” she seemed to
say, like a Clytemnestra turning on her old fool of a husband.
“ I burnt it,” she said.

He said, “ You have killed me, Madame,” and then did
not speak or move for a little while. But his mind was
silently moving about within the cage that now held him

BOOK SIX

295

fast: it felt at the bars here and there. “And my uniform? ”
he presently asked, in a dead voice.

“ I burnt it,” she said.

“ On purpose? ”

“ Yes.”

“ You have put me to death,” he r peatcd.

She had begun to walk up and dow n the tiny floor-space
of the room, turning its cramped jy ualor into something
grotesque in contrast with her superb winging gait. “ You
were half dead,” she said, “and I give you back life. I
give it you now.”

“ Life! ” he muttered, bitterly.

“Yes. Can’t you see? For you to be safe, after this,
you must be a new person, get a new name, have a new life.
And I, alone, have a new life to give, a life free and safe.
See! Here are my husband’s papers — his civil state, his
exemption from service — everything. Stay here and I offer
it all to you. They will think you were killed with the rest
— blown into little pieces or buried.”

She had ceased to stride about and had taken some soiled
pieces of paper out of her clothes and held them out to him.
Her eyes had seemed to grow larger and darker while she
talked, and her face was flushed, and her breathing quick
and eager. She was shaken, and, even in his distress, Victor
saw now in her face something akin to many looks that had
fallen on him from women at home.

At home he had taken lightly enough the incidence of
such looks, as kings take the fervour of crowds that cheer
from the mud while the royal procession passes. In his
world any coming-on humour in women was, at the gravest,
matter for wistful comedy. The Violas and Marianas that
silkily coquetted men into consent, or failed and charmingly
faded away in picturesquely moated granges, were ornaments,
not volcanoes. The magnificent animal stooping over him

296 ROUGH JUSTICE

now, with her heaving chest and clutching eyes, had no more
to do with that graceful world of ineffectual damask cheeks
and faint beatings of frail wings than his own squalid soldier
life had had to do with the pride and pomp of war. There
was a kind of she-spider, some one had told him once, that
made such use of the male as her sex needed, and then killed
off that weaker vessel, as worth keeping no longer. She
looked like some such frightful realist of sex as that — untender,
uncompassionate, seeking her own long-thwarted satisfac-
tion with the singleness of purpose of water dammed up in
an Alpine valley till it smashes through. She used her
beauty with callous directness, shedding its coarse intoxicant
power about him now as if she were Nature herself in some
mood of heartlessness towards the creatures whom she drugs
or hustles into the service of her queer purposes. Be-
wildered and failing, he murmured again, “You have killed
me, Madame — ^and shamed me.”

“ Shamed! ” she exclaimed. “ And what of me? Can’t
you hear people, after the war — ‘ The woman that kept the
young Englishman for herself? ’ Didn’t I try? Did I
make up to you when you came? It was you, with your
handsome face and soft voice and gentleman’s ways, lying
there looking at me — it was you that forced me to give
myself to you.”

He had no armour. He was enmeshed, body and mind,
beyond extrication. “ There, there,” she said, soothing him
with the shallow sympathy of nurses whose thoughts are on
ends of their own. “ As the little children say, let us ‘ kiss
and be friends.’ ” She bent down quickly and kissed him,
not by any means with the kiss of a child.

BOOK SEVEN

CHAPTER XXI
I

Y OU would soon shut this bo« k, with a groan, if it
tried to drag you along the whole of the road the
Comfies travelled from the ay when Victor was
gazetted as “Missing; believed kill d ” to the day when
Auberon was parted, a year later, from all that were then
left of Number One Section.

Ponies that work in mines may have some faint recollec-
tion of having lived long ago in meadows full of warm
sunshine. Most of the men in the section seemed to have
some such sense of a good old world that had come to an
end. The wheel that they were tied to rolled monotonously
round, lugging them interminably through the same cycle of
squalid labour and bedraggled rest, varied with a few bouts
of slaughter that gained nothing of any visible value. They
lost the White Hope and Bert on the bald Thiepval slopes,
Fulford and Turmits in Delville Wood and Smythe in a
raid among the swamps of the Scarpe. Little Mellett was
killed in the first ten seconds the first time the Company
had to attack.

They gained the name of good troops. An Army
Commander, far off in a pleasant chateau embosomed in trees,
would put his pencil on a point on the map, the night before
a battle, and say, “ I’ve got a battalion of Comfies there.
So that bit’s safe.” The G.O.C. of their division told a
war-correspondent who called at his snug hut that the
Comfies were all as jolly as mud-larks. “ They’ll all be
heartbroken if this old war ever ends.” The Comfies read
the words in one of Roads’ papers and passed it grimly from
hand to hand, cursing all liars.

All of them were always tired — even Mr.Gurk; even

297

zgS ROUGH JUSTICE

Auberon; but their will to endure held on as old boots will
hold together long after they ought, on any sober calculation,
to come to pieces. Slowly and unwillingly they had come
to believe that the High Command bungled its job, except
that the grub always came up all right. The men talked
less than before; each had more to hush up; Auberon could
not believe, at the time, that great fellows like Cart, Booker,
McGurk and Ruthven were sometimes feeling themselves
as nearly quelled as he was by brute cold or exhaustion; so
he kept his mouth shut on his shame. But they were all
like that — all beaten, as separate men; each of them sub-
sisting only on the same passionate, groundless faith in the
greater fortitude of the others and clinging doggedly to his
place in such a brotherhood of his betters.

II

It was late in 1916 when Auberon was severed from these
honoured friends. The ineffectual battle of the Somme was
then petering out in a few last spurts of futile bloodshed in
the wet twilight of late autumn mornings. But nothing
worth calling a fight was going on at the time; Auberon, a
sergeant now, was a mile from the front, in command of a
burying party; some of the dead of both sides had lain out
too long and were stinking.

An enemy shell burst at what seemed a safe distance, as
things counted then; but one knife-edged flake of the
broken shell-case flew fast and low and performed a feat like
that of a headsman who makes a clean job of it. Auberon
felt the whizzing thing graze his left hip, and when he
looked down he saw a hand lying on the ground, with its
raw end like a sheep’s severed neck at a butcher’s door.
Things strike you queerly; Auberon gave a foolish little
laugh when he saw that the palm he had washed that
morning was now that futile thing, so absurdly thrown

BOOK SEVEV

299

out of its working relations with him and everything
else.

But severed arteries do not give m ich time for thought.
McGurk flung himself on Auberon vvith vague impulses of
violent tenderness; Auberon had to show the blundering
and crying fellow how the tourniquet business was done and
the leaping jet of blood reduced to a dribble; and then to
give the needful orders to Corporal Ruthven in case he,
Auberon, should not be able to carry • n with the command.
By the time these precautions were taiken a sort of invasion
of darkness and unsureness was besett ng him. “ Must see
Molly about this,” he sagaciously thought to himself, and
then toppled backwards into the waiting arms of McGurk.

“ A proper Blighty one,” Booker pronounced, with frank,
friendly envy, “ as ever I see.”

“ He’s a good man,” Ruthven said. “ He desairves it.
Fall out, McGurk and Booker, an’ carry Sergeant Garth
to One Tree dressing-station. The remainder, carry on
buryin’.”

Disablement brought Auberon a renewal of the amazing
revelation that people have been thinking of you even more
indulgently than they have let on. He awoke on a stretcher
to find Captain Black saying good-bye to him with extra-
ordinarily shining eyes and thanking him for “ all he had
done.” One man after another, from the platoon, managed to
turn up incredibly, out of nowhere, to give him a hail as he
was borne off to the ambulance. Borne! What rot it was!
He could have walked. But he gave in; he knew he had
passed into the keeping of that most absolute of powers, the
R.A.M.C., wherein the civil doctor’s control over his patient
and the colonel’s control over his men are combined into a
very quintessence and distillation of sovereign authority.

300

ROUGH JUSTICE

III

It was bad when the time came to hand in his kit and
receive his discharge from the Army with a good character,
all his back pay and seventeen shillings and sixpence to buy
him some civilian clothes. It felt like real loss of caste to
give up his three greenish-brown stripes and his bomber’s
badge of red wool. “ Would I were with them, whether
in Heaven or Hell,” he felt when he thought of Cart and
the rest, like the man in the little blue Henry F. that he
had now read dozens of times. Wherever they were was
the centre of life; it was mid-stream; all other places were
backwaters, places for lazy lilies and toy boats.

Of course there was home to see, when he came out of
hospital. Often, when things had been going badly in
France, he had regaled himself with visions of the kindly-
faced house flushed to a heart-warming red in the level light
of summer evenings, or wading in mist, up to its knees, in
the primeval stillness of late winter afternoons of the grave
and dim kind. And yet the real thing was, somehow,
imperfect. He came to think now that the visions he had
had in France must have been — although he had not known
it— of the house with Molly about it, with Victor at any
time likely to come, with Bert at work in the garden, and
Fulford always possible too. If he had only known, long
ago, what a good thing he had got! He felt now like a
man with a toothache who thinks, “ Oh, those old times
when I had no toothache! How little I knew of the
immensity of my beatitude then.” Molly nursing in some
unknown place in France, Victor dead, Bert dead, Fulford
dead, almost at the expiry of his self-imposed probation; only
his father remained, and it was only at meals that his father
was not absorbed in some urgent war-work or other.

A few people came to the house; Colin among them.

BOOK SEVEN

301

He was at home on leave from G.H.Q. in France every
three months; he was adorned now with the ribbons of
many medals and orders. He told j ul lant tales of a farcical
competition for such guerdons of valour between himself
and Claude — “ the two most bigoted non-combatants,” he
said, “ on the whole General Staff.”

Mrs. Barbason looked in one da with a wise young
nephew of hers, who seemed to be ( onsciously bearing on
his own shoulders the brunt of the ^var, as a clerk in the
Foreign Office. “ You would hardl / suppose,” he said to
Auberon instructively, “ the amount of wear-and-tear that
there is for your nerves when at any hour of the day or
night you may be literally bombarded.” Even Mrs. Barbason,
no severe critic of any relations of her own, was critical of
this youth. “ It is rather sickening,” she said, “ to have
Leslie bleating with funk in a cellar in London while Claude
is sticking it at the front.”

George Roads, now Sir George, had to be entertained for
a couple of days, for some alleged public purpose, and Garth’s
modest household was hard put to it to take in the war
baronet’s retinue. He brought two Rolls-Royce cars and
two chauffeurs, a body-servant, a golf professional, a short-
hand clerk and a masseur — ^all young, strapping men in high
condition. His papers were crying aloud, at the time, for
“ firmer ” dealings with Quakers and other refrainers from
the fight. But the baronet’s darling hobby was “ German
atrocities.” All his papers offered a full supply of these
daily — crucifixions of captured British soldiers, preferential
bombings of British hospitals, cannibalism by Germans in
the field and so on. He burned to reciprocate these visionary
crimes. “ If Ministers,” he said, “ had any manhood, we’d
soon teach these beasts. We ought to bomb Cologne, night
after night — smash the whole town.”

“ Spend bombs on civilians,” Garth mildly asked, “ when

302 ROUGH JUSTICE

they might be used to cut enemy railway lines to his
front? ”

Roads glared. “ I thought,” he said, “ your own adopted
daughter was bombed by these brutes at fitaples.”

“ Her hospital was hit. Some English and German
wounded were killed. If the airman who did it had aimed
a shade better he’d have hit the big reinforcement camp next
door and killed a hundred Ai men.”

“ You imagine they don’t aim at the Red Cross on pur-
pose? ” Roads indignantly asked.

“ I fancy they’re too keen on winning the war to waste
ammunition like that.”

Roads was bewildered and flustered. He could not com-
prehend these Garths who would work and fight and starve for
England and yet never seemed to see war as it was — as a fight
between a side that could never play fair and a side that could
never hit foul. When Roads said that we ought to put our
biggest munition works out in the open in Essex and Suffolk,
make shells on the lower floors and keep the top floors full
of German prisoners — “ regular screen of ’em. What Aoyou
think? ” Thomas Garth replied, like a man quietly thinking
it out, “ Or we might move our prisoners to Cornwall.”

Roads glared again. “ And if the Huns starve their
prisoners? ”

“ We might give ours double rations.”

Roads’ mouth fell open. “ Why, good God ! ” he said,
“ that’s the old t’other cheek wheeze ! ”

“ Don’t you think,” Garth said, “ that we may be all
taking it too much for granted that Christ just talked through
his hat? ”

IV

During these conversations the eyes of Thomas and
Auberon Garth would often meet silently — not with any
overt expression of contempt for the degenerate before them,

BOOK SEVEN

303

but with the new, completely undcrs anding intimacy that
had begun in the last hours before the war. “ Don’t judge
England by this. We shall win y^;t ” — that was what
Auberon read, plain as print, in hs father’s face. His
father hardly ever mentioned Roads v hen they were alone,
though he spoke of the way that man) other people at home
took the war; how, for example, th Governing Body of
Chellingham had ordained that, as grc wing boys, the school
were not to be subject to the prevail ig restriction of food
by “ voluntary rationing,” and how he boys had risen in
revolt and demanded the more meagre diet, and got it. Also
he told his son how F ulford, an heirless man, had left Molly
by his will the New Hall and everything else that he had
“ as a token of respect and gratitude to her and her family,”
and how Molly had just given the house to be a permanent
home for soldiers incurably disabled. When the last of
Roads’ train of cars was out of sight, all that Garth said was,
“ He may be slyly harbouring some aged German governess
somewhere.” Auberon thought it quite possible. People
always seemed to put their worst foot forward; they wore
on their sleeves a heart far less good than their own. Unless
you were pretty slow, as his father was, to give any one up
as mere vermin, you might come a cropper.

Colin’s feeling towards the great vendor of rubbish in
print was, obviously, not one of mere toleration. He de-
lighted in the idea of such an invincible rogue. “ He’s
Godlike,” said Colin, “ Britain’s extremity’s his opportunity.
He prosecutes his conquest of England all the harder while
poor old England tries to conquer Germany. War hath
her victories for him, no less renowned than peace’s. He
fills his rags with yarns about the German ladies’-maids in
England with bombs in their vanity bags — cheapest ‘ copy *
he can buy — ^and then pesters the Cabinet to buy the paper
by millions as ‘ propaganda ’ to scatter all over the world foi

304 ROUGH JUSTICE

the good of the cause. They’d better do it, too, or Roads
will turn on all his prints to say their wives have German
kitchen-maids or their stepfathers’ first wives were Hun-
garians. You’ve heard his latest masterpiece of strategy —
no? At least you know how the country’s swarming with
war profiteers — the thing’s fabulous — it’s redistributing all
the money in England. Well, Roads has got his Cabinet
friends to put a whopping tax on all these wild war profits.
See how it works? It brings the robbers up against a painful
choice. Either three-fifths of their swag will have to go
back into the nation’s pocket again — dreadful idea! — or else
— now do you see? ”

“ No.”

“ Or else they must spend it on advertising themselves in
the papers of Roads, and his brethren. For then, you see, it
won’t be taxed — it’s business expenses and so it’s deducted
from the profits of the original ramp. You see the line of
thought — ‘ my country would waste the money on shells:
why not use it to advertise my own business? ’ ”

“Well, I’m blowed!” said Auberon, amazed at the
simplicity of this remunerative train of cause and effect.

“ I hear the newspaper advertisement boom is tremendous,”
said Colin — “ biggest ever known. So Roads is dormy —
can’t lose so long as there’s war. We’ll all be ruined, but
he’ll have an extra milch-cow. All in the odour of sanctity,
too. He comes across to visit G.H.Q. and the C.-in-C.
doesn’t kick him. He has the patriot Roads to tea and
sends him about in a closed car, with a person of pleasing
exterior like me to show him the back of the front. He
nearly jumped through the roof when the car skidded an
inch. He thought the Germans were on him. I may tell
you I made a charming impression. I kept the car facing
away from the front, steadily. He said I was the right man
in the right place, and if any damned fools in the Army

BOOK SEVEN

305

tried to do me out of my job I must ;ust let him know and
he’d see me through.”

Auberon liked Colin. Whatever Tommy -rot Colin
might talk, he was fun; he was the only person still alive
who had even a little of Victor’s p *wer of dazzling and
bewildering you pleasantly with eni,;matic chaff. When
Auberon found that life at home was rather too much like
the life of a boy outside a big round tent, with a circus in
full blast within, and begged the W; r OfRce to give him
such work in the field as a one-armed buffer need not make
a mess of, he was glad to find that his commission “ for special
employment ” was likely to bring him to places where Colin
might be seen, and Claude too, and possibly the old battalion,
possibly even Molly herself at her hospital outside Staples,
which some madman in high place had wedged in, as
Auberon’s father had said, between the main railway line
from the sea to our front and the great reinforcement train-
ing camp on the piney sandhills above, as if to collect as many
as possible of the enemy bombs that missed these standard
targets.

V

Now that he was an officer, Auberon’s job was to know
by heart every bit of the British front line and of the roads
in its rear and to be ready at any moment to pilot some
distinguished guest of our Army to any point he might wish
to see. The guests were of all sorts — Allied or neutral
military attach<^s, British and foreign statesmen, generals,
famous writers, world - shaking journalists, captains of
industry and leaders of labour. Auberon learned to study
his men, each after his kind, as God had created them. He
kept in hand a kind of working stock of war-like peep-shows
and tit-bits of sensation, to suit different tastes. Some of
the visitors, he knew, would enjoy the place at Blangy,
east of Arras, where the two front lines came within a

X

3o6 rough justice

dozen yards of each other, so that the air there was always
heavy with silence and holding of breath. Others were sure
to take delight in the piquant traverse of the Grande Place
at Ypres, where a German gunner on the heights east of
the town would sometimes try to snipe your car as it scurried
across the bumpy open square to plunge, like a rabbit, into
the cover of the ruinous houses beyond. For some the
underground world of our electrically lighted catacombs in
the Loos salient would be a safe draw; for others the wide
prospect over the enemy lines from the sly observation-post
high up in the monastery ruins on Mont St. Eloi, or from
the peep-hole tunnel bored through Kemmel Hill, or from
one of the shattered houses east of Maroc. And, above all,
Auberon kept many mental notes of points where a car and
its driver could be left safely on the west, or leeward, side of
a tall heap of ruins while Auberon walked his charges up
the remaining couple of miles to the front trench.

All these dissimilar sightseers interested Auberon vastly.
He found that Army Commanders and eminent trade-union
officials were often curiously alike — in their convivial jollity,
their taste in funny stories, their habit of trenchancy, their
unbookishness and their knack of getting on with all sorts
of men; they took to each other at once. A famous writer,
often abused as being no patriot, but a cur, was the only
one, of all the people he took to Ypres, who begged to be
let drive the car across the square by himself — “ It’s rotten,”
he said, “ that serving soldiers like you and the chauffeur
should run any risk in taking joy-riders about.” The only
guest who gave him trouble was a celebrated martial orator
who brought a photographer to photograph him posed on
the summit of the newly captured Vimy Ridge. “ How
could I die better? ” this worthy said when Auberon vetoed
the proceeding as likely to draw enemy fire. Auberon did
not explain that his own chief concern was not lest the

BOOK SEVEN 307

eloquent person should die, but lest fire be drawn on a
working-party of English soldiers wt\o were shovelling earth
close by. But he reflected silently ind sagaciously: Oh, he
was coming to know quite a lot abo t human nature.

In the practice of his new vocttion he watched, from
carefully chosen points of high groi nd, or from the tops of
surviving trees, all the chief oper .tions in the battles of
Arras, Messines, Flanders and Can brai. He never ceased
to thrill at the eastward rush of his v*ar in the early morning
darkness before these fights, through the sleeping towns of
Flanders or Artois, along the avenues of waving poplars,
towards the fitful radiance that jumped and winked over the
front, a fan-shaped effusion of light swelling up from the
ground for an instant and then subsiding as quickly and
leaping out somewhere else, as though a great invisible lamp
were being swung about behind the globe of the earth and
coming up nearly to the horizon at the end of each swing,
but never quite raising the actual flame above it.

Before each attack he would take pains to find out whether
the Comfies were to be in it. If they were, he would coax
the guest of the day up to some place where news, at any
rate, could be had of their fortunes. Thus he watched from
afar the dwindling of his friends. Captain Black went at
Messines, tortured to death by a wound in the groin after
leading the Company in three attacks without a scratch;
but Cart, Booker, McGurk and Ruthven lived on, taking a
wound now and then, but always finding their way back to
the battalion. Auberon had the luck to catch sight of a
shock of flaming red hair and two great cheek-bones, like
knees, as he entered a ward of the Hospital of St. John at
Staples, to which he had conducted a great American
surgeon on an off-day. There was no mistaking McGurk.

The Gael was apologetic about his injuries. “ If ye’ll
believe me,” he pleaded, “ it couldn’t be helped. We’re not

3o8 rough justice

at all the deminted bein’s that ye’ll remimber we were, the
time we came out, tryin’ hard to be kilt for nothin’ at all,
like hairoes in theayters — ofFcers no better than min, an’
Captain Black apt to gab in his sleep to the day of his dith,
so his batman informs me, about the desthruction he’d done
on The Beak and Capel — the wan that we called Caruso
the Song — an’ all Number Two Section, the very first day
we wint into the line, be not condiscindin’ to march be
sictions on roads under innimy observation, an’ he the best
ofFcer ever came next or nigh us and not the like of the
Staff an’ commands that’d beat all at ofFrin’ Christian souls
their bist chance of gratu’tous extinction an’ no cornin’ up
of supports — an’ th’innimy always at it, assistin’ the fool
work, be tryin’ every expayjent not to be kilt but to win the
war only.”

VI

That was a great day, for it brought, besides, an even
more wondrous reunion. In the late afternoon Auberon
left his American friend to enjoy half an hour’s shop talk
with an English brother - master of the craft. Auberon
wanted to walk about the brown and white town of hut and
tent hospitals, on the off chance that Molly, too, might be
off duty and taking a walk; and, as if his wishing were an
efficacious form of prayer, he had scarcely walked as far as
the twist in the Camiers road, where it makes a sudden
right turn, to pass under the railway that runs beside it,
when he met Molly in her outdoor clothes. They were
only two yards apart when they came into each other’s
sight and said: “ You, Bron! ” and “ Hullo, Molly! ” with
the grotesque inadequacy of their kind when tremendous
occasions arise.

She turned back, away from the hospital and towards the
little fishing town. As he walked beside her you might
have thought they had nothing to say. Presently she

BOOK SEVFN

309

touched his sleeve that had no wrist inside, and said, “Your
poor hand!” Then she examined his face with sidelong
looks, joyous and anxious at the same time. “ You’re thin,
too,” she said almost accusingly, as mothers do.

He had to force the brusquely ovial note. “ Well,”
he said, “ d’you wake all the patients to wash ’em, at five in
the morning, as they did me? ”

She laughed a little. “ You know why, of course? The
night nurses want to have everythin,; ready to nip off duty
at eight. It is rather stony. I’ll jump on it when I’m a
Matron.”

They had renewed by now their old way of making
common or joint movements by tacit consent, a kind of
unison of impulse. So they halted, without a word said, on
the quaint bridge over the trivial estuary of the Canche.
They had got to say real things now, if ever; their time
was short — he knew it, and knew that she knew it; yet,
for a few minutes more they both looked down at the dirty
salt-water ebb eddying at the tail of a pier. Then she
asked, with an amazing clear firmness: “ Where was he
killed? May you say? ”

“ At Ranvert I’fitang, seven miles east of Breteuil. On
the high-road to Lille. There are three big elms — only
stumps, of course, now — on the right of the road.”

“ I’ll put that down,” she said quickly. She took out a
pencil and wrote on the back of an old letter.

He stared. “ You don’t mean to say ? ” he began.

“ There’s a bare chance,” she said, “ that I might see it.
There’s a new plan now of ‘ flying teams ’ — ^a surgeon, a
chloroform man and a nurse. They’re sent wherever any-
thing extra is doing, up the line — it may be anywhere.”

They gazed down again for a while at the ragged weeds
under water, stringing out wavily from their roots in the old
wooden piles of the bridge. She suddenly said, with

310 ROUGH JUSTICE

that strange hard clearness again : “ Is it certain he’s
dead? ”

“ Nothing was found but his cap and his rifle. But —
Molly, don’t hope.” He grabbed her hand, it seemed so
brutal to stamp the life out of vain hopes without anything
to show that he meant kindly. “ Nothing is found — quite
often. You see — a lot of them were killed together. And
then other shells come. Bodies get buried, by accident.”

Her hand lay coldly in his. “ Oh yes, I know,” she
said, wearily, as if it were something she had turned over
and over, a thousand times. “ But isn’t there, say, one
chance to ten thousand? ”

“ Less. I’m sorry, Molly. It’s less.”

She seemed to be carrying on a sort of cold argument in
her mind — audibly. ' “ Aren’t there records of people found,
after wars, who had seemed to be killed? They had delirium
or they were paralysed by their wounds, or what we call
shell-shocked, and then they were picked up by country
people who kept them alive but did not know what to do
about sending them home, so that they sank into some
wretched life where they were.”

Auberon’s reason rejected such visions. “ War,” he said,
“ is too methodical now. The whole country’s policed.
Every one living is down on some list. You couldn’t get
lost — any more than you could on the pitch, with the ’Varsity
cricket-match on.”

“ I know,” she said. Only — do you see, Bron ! — it

has to be proved'^ She looked at him intensely and en-
treatingly, as though in appeal to some understanding that
he ought to have of what was moving her. Then her eyes
flinched away, as it were, from his face — he couldn’t tell
why, and she stared down doggedly again at the water-weeds
moored to the piles and streaming seaward just as the long
hair of drowned women might stream.

BOOK SEVEN

3 ”

Auberon looked down at them t)o, and saw that the
streamers were now becoming less tau* and more dishevelled
“ Low water! ” he said, and looked at his watch. “ Five
o’clock! I must bolt to my man.”

They walked back, through the squat village that smelt of
fish, tarry cordage and brine, to the g eat hospital camp with
its smell of antiseptics and soap, lialf-way she said, as
though it had come in the middle of some conversation,
“ How easy it is to make great mistakes — the ones that last
you for years — perhaps all your life.”

“ It is all pretty difficult, ain’t it? ” he said. It was true.
It was what he had to feel very often; but why should Molly
feel it — she that had always had the knack of rightness in
everything she did?

There was a silence and then she said, “ Do you like your
work? ”

“ Like it? My work is to do every Jack thing there is,
except the one thing that has got to be done if we’re ever to
win this old war,”

She gave his upper arm a sympathetic grip with her strong
hand and then quickly let go. “ I’m sorry, Bron. I have
the luck. Mine’s a good job. The next thing is always
there, ready to do — and no time to lie about, crying on
graves, or being a fool or regretting some old foolishness.”

“ One does get a sort of peace out of it, don’t you? ” he
said, with the unflecked serenity of his old soldiering days
recalling themselves to his mind.

“ I fancy,” she said, “ that the way to be happy is to sign
on as a slave, by your own choice, and then just stick it out.
You keep some sort of rag of pride flying, that way, and
you’re free from all the old bother of running round wonder-
ing what you’re to do to be saved or to have a good time.
You only go on and on, like some tiny star, as a part of
whatever it is that keeps everything going, and trust it’s

312 ROUGH JUSTICE

worth while. That’s faith, I suppose. ‘ In His will is our
peace,’ and all that.”

‘‘ I guess that’s right,” he said. “ I seem to get it clearer
since I chucked training for a parson. The way men like
McGurk and Booker and Cart stick on to the line that,
whatever goes wrong, whatever fool any one over them
makes of himself, the one thing worth doing in life is to
pull off this war — that’s faith all right, or the nearest thing
I’ve ever seen to it.”

They passed under the dank railway arch as he spoke.
Beyond it, a few hundred yards, her hospital lay. At its
little garden-gate they parted, with not a word yet said out
of all the consolatory utterances that Auberon had planned
for their first meeting since Victor’s deatli.

CHAPTER XXn

I

B y the evening of August 7, 1918, Auberon’s mess
.at the old Chateau of Vaurig: ies had for a whole
^week been enlivened by Col I’s presence. Colin
amused himself in the War Office r )w; it was the only
place, he declared, where gallantry co ild get its full reward
in these times; certainly many ribbor s of foreign orders of
chivalry had lately added themselves to the beauty of the
bosom of his tunic Just for a fortnig ht he had quitted this
rich harvest-field and come out to France on somef “ special
duty ” or other — perhaps to work up a case of some sort,
for some political worthy at home to use against somebody
else. “ Some filthy wangle, no doubt,” Claude Barbason
said in his own mess, which was ensconced in the quaint
moated Chateau of Mouchy-le-Bois, ten miles off across the
downs.

Every one’s wits were lively to-night. The great battle
was coming at dawn: every one knew; every one had his
elating or awesome vision of to-morrow’s fatefulness; to one
it was fraught with hope of his own release from the long
shame of being out of the fight; to another it brought a
happy thrill of vicarious adventure, like owning a favourite
for to-morrow’s Derby. But Colin’s elation overcrowed
every one else’s; the vivifying zest of his enjoyment acted
like one of those super-bright mirrors which seem to put a
curious overcharge of life into the things they reflect.

Colin had just gone, as the eyes and ears of somebody
more august, to a grand pow-wow in Paris, about “ Propa-
ganda,” the darling theme of many ignoble souls at the time
— the hope, as Colin said, of winning the war by spitting,
since shells couldn’t do it Colin described with ribald
vivacity this conference of solemn mudlarks. The great

313

314 ROUGH JUSTICE

Roads had been there, to advise, as Britain’s champion spitter
of detraction at all ranges; Colin gloated over the sight of
Roads set in the midst of a respectful ring of Allied statesmen
and warriors, with his funny “ firm ” jaw and absurd set
expression, like a cheap movie actor’s. “ A tyre,” said
Colin, “ burst in the street, like a bomb, just when the still,
strong man was bluffing his way through a whole harangue
of cliches about not making war in kid gloves and so on —
and then the still, the strong, turned whity-green and flung
himself under the table. It was the frankest thing he ever
did. I loved him for it.”

Yes, Auberon reflected as he listened; Colin really did like
any one, noble or scrubby, who lived with a will and gave
his nature its full fling, for better- or worse. And perhaps
he was right. It* was pleasant to think so. Through
the open window of the mess, when Colin paused for a few
moments, there came from the men’s quarters, fifty yards off,
the prettily tinkling tune of a popular song played on a
concertina by some man at ease after his work; the last rays
of sunlight for the day were throwing absurdly long shadows
of trees all over the meadows. Everything was quiet and
Auberon felt himself irrationally softened. His mind went
back to the doomed battlefield of to-morrow. He had seen
it to-day with a Scandinavian military attach^, to whom he
was to show the fighting at daybreak. All the wide, sun-
filled, figureless landscape east of our crowded line had lain
sabbatically still through the hot afternoon, seeming almost
to ache with a kind of taut vacuousness; soon would come
the motionless night of the front, unbroken unless by the
light plop and slow swishing soar of a few rocket lights, the
sleepy grumble of some far-away gun and the low, clear
sound of iron-tyred German wagons grinding along distant
roads, like the midnight rumble of the market-gardeners’
carts through good old peaceful Middlesex. Ten hours

BOOK SEVEN

3*5

more and some twenty thousand men wh ) were now patiently
cleaning rifles or munching dusty brea i or spitting on dry
hands would be led out and put to deat i, whatever good or
harm they had done in their lives. At any rate they were
not finding fault with each other’s pasts now. And weren’t
they right? Like the sun’s good hi.mour, and Colin’s,
theirs shone on the just and the unjust alike, Thersites and
Bayard.

Colin was rattling away again — pok ing fun at “ all us
shirkers in khaki ” — and at himself mos^ of all. “ Of course
I’m the jeune premier des emhusques — I’rn juvenile lead in the
whole farce of funk — I’m the Unconscientious-Objector-in-
Chief but every one else in the cast, he allowed, was good
in his part — the whole of the Staff, from Army Commanders
up to John Immals :

‘‘ Immals, with his surly hum!

Delivering o’er to executors pale
The lazy, yavming drone.”

— thus did Colin turn the jet of his gay insolence on another
guest of the mess, Captain Immals, the somewhat black-
avised Assistant Provost- Marshal of the neighbouring Army
Pleadquarters. Auberon scarcely heard the garbled quota-
tion — Colin was always garbling quotations for fun. A kind
of vesper rapture was filling Auberon’s mind. Sunset and
evening star, sunset and evening star — he thought the lovely
words over to himselfj and yet the serene air was astir, in a
way; it had a kind of still quickness, as if the world were
listening; it felt like that when a spring tide in the Thames
came to its full height in the dark; the waters stood still, but
they made an infinitesimal rustle as they felt about among dry
grasses which common tides did not reach.

3i6

ROUGH JUSTICE

II

After dinner several men of the company slipped out to
work; Colin, the Scandinavian attache and one or two others
went off to play billiards ; Auberon flitted in and out of the
house, keeping an eye on the weather. Oh for a fine dawn
to-morrow, with no rain or cloud, only just a thick early mist
to veil Cart, McGurk, Ruthven and Booker while they
walked up to the German machine-guns, and then a hot sun
all day to warm their bodies and hearts. At one of his restless
returns to the ante-room Auberon perceived that Captain
Immals was finding his tongue. Immals was one of your
slow starters in conversation; Colin compared him to a
Stilton because you had to pour port into him to get him
prime. The mess' port was doing its kind office now, and a
little ring of young officers unversed in carnage was draw-
ing in round Immals. Auberon knew what that meant.
Immals was talking the shop of his trade as a conductor of
executions at dawn.

He was an ill-looking fellow; his face was well enough
made, but foul in colour; it had the greenish pallor that some
men show when thoroughly funked, and there were dark
baggy pouches under his eyes; Immals’ drinks always seemed
to inflate these pouches and make him look more like a toad
than he did earlier in the day. Besides, he had a grin to make
you shiver: it came on very strong at some turns in his stock
abattoir yarns. The mess called him Jack Ketch; but
Colin, being more profoundly read in belles leitresy christened
him “ Jean qui rtcaney^ to distinguish him from the weeping
and the laughing hangman in the story. Auberon had
thought it queer that so beastly a job should have found a man
with a face to fit it so well; in books, this sage critic had
begun to observe, people’s looks suited their jobs, but not so
often in life.

BOOK SEVEN

317

At the next of Auberon’s fidgety re-entries the listening
circle had drawn closer in; the lister; ers were staring at
Immals in a stuck way, as though they loathed the sight of
him and yet could not look anywhere ^Jse; they were like
school-children who stop to see a pi[^ killed. The next
moment Colin came in from his usual mn at billiards, saw
what was on, and broke jauntily into t ie ending of one of
Immals’ old stories of shootings at da\^ n. How the devil,
Colin asked, did Immals keep up a proper head of game for
all these shoots of his? Were there dt serters lying up, all
over the country, in old badgers’ earths, to be dug out when
wanted?

Whisky-time, the sweet o’ the night, had arrived. That
was when Immals was always best in his part. At Colin’s
enquiry a beastly smile of superior knowledge came out on
Immals’ face. Colin, no doubt, had known that it would.
Colin had known Immals long. And now he had touched
a bell, as it were, at the door of the degenerate’s brain and
had got his ring answered. He went on; he drew Immals
out; he was like a man casting a fly and watching to see the
black snout of a dace shoot up at the fly from deep down in a
pool. “ Now, if I,” Colin said, “ with my mouthful of low,
vulgar French, should have occasion to desert, I should use
my talents for gallantry — gallantry in the more exquisite
sense. I should make it my care to console the widow of
some French rustic of substance, probably killed in the war.
I should succeed to the goodman’s pipe and slippers. I
should fade imperceptibly into the life of the country. Ever
get such a case, Immals? Or am I to make the first move? ”

Immals’ second whisky was now at his right hand and the
pride of knowingness leered from his fece. “ That’s the
very stalest old dud,” he pronounced impressively, “ in the
whole bag of tricks. ‘ Protective assimilation ’ we call it
W'hat the grubs do, you know — get ’emselves up the colour

3i8 rough justice

of leaves. In this Army alone we’ve shot four and a half
brace of these gentlemen farmers.”

“ But how the hell d’you mark ’em to earth? ” a wide-
eyed subaltern gasped.

With a confidential gesture Immals drew the little circle
closer about him. “ Listen ! ” he said. He explained.
Whenever an A.P.M. went about, he took care to make
friends with a few natives of the right sort. He primed them.
They were to keep their eyes open. If anything queer
should be seen in their village, or round it — any new face at
the pub, any strange labourer at a farm, any odd beggar
hanging around whom nobody knew — they were to send
word at once to a certain address. That would be money
to them. “Thrifty people, the French,” Immals said.
“ We don’t miss much of the talk of the village.”

“ I see,” said Colin demurely, “ I’ll have to live a bit out
of the village.” He paused for a second and then added,
“ And get myself listed as killed.”

Immals winked as he tipped off the end of his drink.
“ Why, only yesterday morning, one of our friendlies brought
in an old pair of pants with a regimental number still legible
on ’em. It’s the number of one of our men who was listed
‘ Missing; believed killed,’ all but three years ago.”

“ That’s nothing,” Auberon hurriedly said. “ Half the
civilians in France are wearing our old army pants.”

Immals snarled round at him. “ Are they also wearing
the army identification marks of the very man the pants
belong to? ‘ Marks or scars — leaf-shaped mole at the back
of the base of left little finger? ’ Eh? Are they shamming
mad in a French war-widow’s house, not half a mile from
where the proper pants man disappeared? ”

Auberon was silenced. But still he thought “These
moles prove nothing. Why! Victor had a mole you might
mistake for this poor devil’s, whoever he is.” The thought

BOOK SEVEN

319

absorbed him for a few seconds. Then 1 e saw Colin eyeing
him with a curious intentness and heard Immals say some-
thing not clear; about this hour each e^/ening the voice of
Immals used to thicken; still Auberon thought he had heard
a place-name once familiar. At Ran^ert I’fitang did you
say? ” Auberon asked.

Immals spun round on his chair. “ N •. I didn’t. Who
the hell told you? ”

Colin had grabbed the whisky-bottle i:p from its tray and
he came to Immals’ elbow and jogged it. “ A drappie? ”
he said. “ A drappie to put in your ee,” and had half-filled
the tumbler almost before Immals could turn to him.

“ Oh, I used to know the old place,” said Auberon lamely.

Immals took a goodly sup of the neat stuff, and a further
instalment of his official reticence went the way of what had
melted already. “ Well,” he said, “ since you know such a
lot, d’you know a mangy farm by an old quarry, north of
Ranvert Crucifix? ”

Auberon nodded.

** That’s the bower o’ bliss an’ beauty,” Immals leered.

** We lost some good men there,” said Auberon.

“ Lose any ‘ Missing; believed killed ’? ” Immals asked.

“ Yes, Fritz blew ’em to mince on the road. We
couldn’t assort all the bits, to tell which was which. Some
others were buried alive. We had to leave them.” As
Auberon recalled these things he saw Colin, bottle in hand,
jog Immals’ elbow again. “You’re drinking nothing,”
Colin said, as he filled the whole tumbler. “ Drink, man
— drive away care.”

Immals automatically raised the stuff to his lips and then
grinned at Auberon. “ One of ’em, Number 39507,
Private V. F. J. Bevin, Devin, Devil, Nevil — that’sh man
— Nevil? ”

Slowly and coldly Auberon said, “ No. No number near

320 ROUGH JUSTICE

it in the battalion,” The words were literally true, and
yet he was lying, after eighteen years of telling no lies.
Victor’s number, with only the 8 of the 89507 faded into a
3 on the old wool; Victor’s initials; Victor’s name just
bedevilled a little by Immals’ booze; the mole, the year;
the very place. All the light, that had been slow to come,
rushed in at once and he saw that Victor was alive as a rat
is alive when the net is over its hole and the ferret ready.
Auberon had always taken knocks as they came, without
wailing or going away to lie down and think: so he was
trained; shame and darkness had filled his world in one
second; yet he could fall to, at once, on the only next thing
to be done, the telling of any lie Victor might need,
and keeping a wooden face for the world, like a battered
boxer.

Immals was answering a question of Colin’s. “ No,
we’ll let him go on shovelling dung till we want him. Saves
quarters and rations. B’shides, no special need of whole-
some warnings just now in this Army. Fact, moraPs
rather good at the moment. Later on, we may have to
ask a bit more of the men. A stoat or two may come in
handy then, to nail up on the door.”

A pink subaltern suddenly spluttered, “ Let the poor devil
off. He’s dead already, for anything any one knows. Why
not let him go on being dead? ”

Immals turned on the boy like a dog that bares his teeth
when you come near his bone. “ Oho ! ” he snarled.
“ Desertion condoned if you sham dead as well ! ”

The pink boy collapsed into silent wretchedness. Immals
glared round triumphantly, “ Any more sentimentalists
knocking about? ” his look seemed to ask. “ Hullo ! ” he
said, his eyes falling on Auberon as they revolved. “ Hadn’t
you better try some ’baccy ’shtead of that hot air? ” Auberon
had lit a match without filling his pipe and was sucking the

BOOK SEVEN

321

flame of the match through the stem. It burnt his mouth,
but he kept his face wooden. Immals offered his pouch.

“ Thanks,” Auberon said. ** I’ll get mine. I’ve a craze
for old twist.” He had his pouch in bis pocket; still — he
must get out of that room, whatever the pretext. He got
out. The knack of lying was coming 1 ick to him finely.

Ill

He made for the garden and flopped down on a stone
bench. He wanted darkness — darkness is kind; it does not
stare at you; it lets you alone, to count up your losses and
think what to do.

There was nothing to do. He thought and thought, but
nothing came. There was only one chance. Victory,
sweeping and swift, was the only thing that might save
Victor now. Let us but win, and happy Generals, with
their titles and grants of money full in view, would be fairly
hunting about for poor brutes to let off, whatever they might
have done.

He examined the sky. Not a wisp of cloud in it; the
air scarcely stirred; over park-land and meadow a fleecy
sheet of ground mist had laid itself evenly out, a few inches
thick. With the earth hot and damp, and the air cold
above, that mist ought to thicken all night — the best thing
possible for our attack. Yes, there was a bare chance for
Victor.

There were not rooms for all in the house; so he had
been sleeping, of late, on a camp-bed in a field a hundred
yards from the garden front of the house, with no tent over
him to turn the fresh and changeful friendliness of night
into a stuffy sameness. The nights had been colder of late,
and this premonition of autumn had been enhancing the
joy of a little private rite with which Auberon had always
celebrated the scrumptiousness of going to bed. With a

r

321 ROUGH JUSTICE

quick plunge of his head right under the blankets, as he got
in, he had surrendered himself for some minutes to an
enchanting illusion of entering into some other minute cubic
space of warmth and ease, all aglow; the cabin of a tiny
yacht moored out among drift ice on the Thames estuary,
its little stove burning bright with frost, and the hanging
lamp’s flame burning steady and still; or a gypsy van with
its shutters closed and its coal fire glorious within, far out on
a December waste of white moor; or a wooden hut clinging
fast to a mountain’s iced shoulder, the pine logs ablaze on
the fire and the soup hot in the pot when the last half-
frozen climber gains the door and rests and thaws
himself in Elysium and listens exultantly to the wail
of the baffled storm and the creak of the hut’s straining
timbers.

To-night, without thinking what he was doing, he just
omitted all that, and then wondered why. Perhaps that
was what grief was. Twice or thrice since the smash he
had thought, “ Am I an insensible brute? ” — he seemed so
much the same man as before, so little visited by the lofty
emotions that people bereaved or ruined or shamed in books
seemed to feel; no fine tragic prostration of soul; only the
dulling of a little private joy and the dying down of a freakish
old impulse? For a second he wanted to talk to Molly
about it; then he remembered — why, the rest of his life
would have to be spent in remembering not to tell things to
Molly.

He lay on his back, looking up at the dome overhead,
which was pulsing now with the multitudinous quiver of
full starlight. All these last years of shaken certainties he
had liked that look of vibrant steadiness in clear night skies;
whatever broke or was found to have rotted, down here,
you could still see that a strong fixity and an undodgeable
order were, at least, things that could be. But somewhere

BOOK SEVEN

323

under this shimmering ceiling, with i"s fresco painting of
unalterable law, Victor was crawling aoout, unable to face
it; Auberon saw him with rending vi oddness; Victor was
lying, face down, on a dirty mattress and then he gave a
start and went creeping to the farm door with a candle
guttering over his shaking hand, to i^aswer some fancied
knock. Oh, damn the stars and their cc d-blooded wheeling,
paying out the hours till Victor died in torment, or that
winged victory came.

He sat up to look round, and saw that the ground mist
was deepening still. Yes, that was all r ght. As he looked,
his eye was caught by movements inside the chateau. All
along this northern front there ran, on each floor, a corridor
with many windows. Several figures were passing along
the corridor on the ground floor. Their shadows were
thrown successively on the thin blind of each window, from
the east wing, where the ante-room lay, to the west, where
the main door was. The engine of a motor started; voices,
now out of doors but dulled by the intervening house,
became audible. Obviously the mess were seeing oflF the
entertainer of the evening. “ Goo’ night, all ! ” came
Immals’ voice, very thick now; and the departing car got
down to its work with a sigh of relief.

IV

The last lights went out in the house. Night was left
to herself and she possessed her soul in quiet; even the ever-
lasting reverberation of far-away guns became like a soft
reverie about old, harsher sounds; filmy webs of dew tickled
Auberon’s face with moth-like caresses. Surely he could
think quietly now — perhaps think of something to do. But
thought came in no form but pictures of Molly hearing
about Victor or pictures of Victor himself skulking through
year after year of horrible days, like the beasts that live out

324 ROUGH JUSTICE

whole lives of panic, peering and sniffing — rats, badgers,
wood-lice huddled under old boards.

Half an hour’s vigil had passed when a shaft of sudden
light fell on the back of his head from the direction of the
chateau. He turned at once, but the light was already
withdrawn. It was as if some one had looked to see if he
was there. He scrutinised the chateau, but for a minute or
two it was utterly dark. Then a thin, stabbing jet of
bright light — clearly it was thrown by an electric flash-
lamp — appeared at the east end of the corridor, upon the
bedroom floor. Across the whole width of the house the
fitfully brandished spear of light passed from window to
window; somebody must have it in his hand to light his
way to the stair-head at the west flank of the house. At the
extreme western window of the upper floor the light sank
low, but in a second or two it brightened again in the window
below, which was that of the hall. There the light burned
steadily for a moment; then it went out altogether and
Auberon, in the extreme stillness of the night, heard the
outer door of the chdteau quietly closed.

The symptoms did not trouble him. Some insomniast,
perhaps, or some one out for a look at the stars — ^and that
would be no wonder either. So Auberon had returned for
ten minutes or so to his own rueful thoughts when a symptom
came that was quite of another order. This was the un-
mistakable sound of a car doing what no car should do at that
hour — coming out of the stables which now were a British
army garage; they stood a hundred yards away from the
chateau, on its ferther side. “ One of the drivers,” Auberon
swiftly conjectured, “out after a woman and trusting all
officers to be bats and see nothing.” In two seconds more
Auberon, clad in low gum boots and pyjamas, was speeding
round the eastern wing of the chateau, to save the British
army’s petrol from unlawful use.

BOOK SEVEN

325

He was a fast mover. But so was somebody else. As
Auberon turned the flank of the chatejiu he heard the key
grind in the old stable-yard’s grandiose- gate. In another
instant the lightless car that was standing in the drive
outside the gate had started. Auberor- put two fingers to
his mouth and blew, with the timbre of j railway engine, the
“ Rally ” blast that orders scattered men to double in towards
the whistler.

No attention was paid. The car bad already gathered
pace enough to outrun the fastest go<.‘r on foot. It was
scudding through the open gates of fair Renaissance ironwork
that divided the chateau garden from the avenue outside.
Just beyond the gates the drive crossed, by a level bridge,
the little river Soubise; a water-mill stood a little to the left,
up-stream, and the lasher below the dam boiled almost under
the road. No other sound but the roar of the tumbling
water could reach the ear of any one crossing the stream; so
Auberon waited a second or two, to let the truant get the
use of his hearing, and then he split the ear of night again
with the same rasping signal of recall. No notice was taken.
The sound of the hastening car diminished down the long
avenue.

“ An A.S.C. man! ” thought Auberon. “ Doesn’t know
a signal when he hears it.” The sound of the engine
changed for a moment as the car reached the avenue’s end
and debouched into the most famous of the great roads
running east from the sea to the front; then the steady purr
was resumed; and in a few minutes more the car itself came
into sight as a rushing black speck on the white star-lit
dust of the road where it climbed a bare down in the east;
it stood lifted up for a moment, huge on the sky-line, and
then dipped swiftly down over the crest of the ridge, out of
hearing and sight.

Brett, the sergeant in charge of the drivers and cars, was

326 ROUGH JUSTICE

now plunging downstairs from his loft under the roof of a
many-columned Temple of Flora. Brett was in trousers,
unlaced boots and a shirt with its tails flying free. He had
a rifle, too, and a full bandolier.

“You’re a good un to sleep, Sergeant,” said Auberon.
“ Here’s a car gone.”

“ Heard nothing. Sir, only the ‘ Rally,’ ” said Brett. “ I
thought Fritz was come.”

They examined. The key of the yard gate was still in
the lock. A car was gone, right enough. But no man was
missing; every one of those healthy organisms had slept
through the whole episode. Auberon sent Brett back to his
loft and returned alone to the sleeping chateau. He followed,
backwards, the route of the moving light that he had seen —
up the broad, shallow stairs, under the darkling tapestry
picture of Abraham’s intended sacrifice of Isaac, and so
along the first-floor corridor to the west wing, whence it
had started. Colin’s bedroom door was ajar, and Auberon
tip-toed in to see was he awake and to ask if he had heard
anything. But there was no Colin there; some one had
lain on the bed, but not in it; folded pyjamas lay on a chair,
and a candlestick, poised on a pile of French comedies
bound in pink and blue paper, stood by its head; the memoirs
of Benvenuto Cellini lay open, face down, on the counterpane
at its side. So? It was Colin, then? Well, it was rather a
relief! Heaven be thanked, he was Auberon’s superior in
rank; Auberon had not to keep him in order.

V

The little stir had done Auberon good. Something to do.
something to do— that was the thing, in all tempests and
troubles; so long as something called out to be done on the
nail, you could fight off black care.

He only found his bed by feeling for it: a waist-deep mist

BOOK SEVEN

327

submerged it now. From the star-lit ai^ round his head he
looked out over this pallid quilt. Good old mist; that was
the stuff to be prayed for. If prayer De not the form of
kneeling and using the vocative case, but the bending up of
every fibre of your heart into a passion yf humble hope, he
may be said to have prayed then for the ;reat rush of victory
that might let Victor live. And if s »me better state of
oneself is all the answer that prayer can ;iope for, his had its
measure of efficacy too. A kind of pea-je possessed him for
two minutes; before the third was up he was asleep, with
just an hour to go before he should be called to breakfast by
lamplight with his Scandinavian friend and bring him to see
the battle at dawn.

CHAPTER XXIII

I

At 2 A.M,, to the tick, Auberon was awaked by the
yLA alarum clock which an old N.C.O. keeps somewhere
A JLin his vitals. At three he and Colonel Nordern, his
charge, were to start for the battle-field, in a car, to see
history made. The attach^ had been all on fire last night
to be there in good time and miss nothing.

For some seconds Auberon’s waking mind was filled with
nothing but joy at the muffling mist — wet pillowy bulks of
it that tumbled slowly about the meadow. Then he re-
membered; the new misery flooded back and swamped
everything. Still, there was something that had to be done.
From job to job you could always hold on. Besides, the
mist was still good; it fought for Victor and Molly.

He had finished his breakfast alone, and the car, with his
kit for a week packed on board, was palpitating at the
chateau door, when an orderly brought the message ;
“ Colonel Nordern’s compliments to Captain Garth, and
the Colonel thinks hadn’t they better give the fog time to
lift? ”

Auberon was not surprised: he had conducted many
attach 6s. Nor could he cold-pig the sluggard and make him
get up: he was a neutral and had to be petted. So Auberon
sent his chauffeur back to bed, lit a pipe and listened till the
mess-room clock struck three with an expression of blank
frustration in its voice. Then he went out to the front of
the house to loiter the lost time away, stood for a while
under its sightless face of drawn blinds, and then walked on
a little and sat on the low stone parapet of the bridge that
carried the drive across the tumbling bay below the mill.
The constant din of the weir sounded friendly; it was the
noise that had been in his ears whenever he went to sleep or

32S

BOOK SEVEN

329

woke up, as a child, and any good old th ng that did not fall
to pieces was treasurable now.

Morning broke as he sat; a dark grey (>paqueness blenched
till it was a white one. It was very thick. Immured in a
tiny cell of visibility he could hear the steadily advancing
munch of a cow feeding onwards, somewhere in the outer
misty world; and then the first hoarse twitter or creak of
birds still sleepy, like military attaches; and then the distant
drone of some car early out on the grea’^: road — a sound of
little moment to him till it suddenly c hanged for a few
seconds, ceased, and began again; its oistinctness was in-
creasing quickly, showing that the invisible car had turned
into the avenue and was now nearing the bridge at high
speed. Just short of the bridge the road swerved a little; if
a strange driver scorched in this mist he would probably miss
the swerve and go straight into the lasher.

Auberon jumped up and ran forward. “ Halt, you
there! ” he shouted to the improvident Jehu. The non-
ignorable barrack-square rasp was in his voice, and the
brakes of the car went instantly on, with a brutal scrunch
on the road. He walked on a few yards and out of the
mist there emerged the ravished car. Colin was at its wheel,
magnificent in an imposing flying-coat of reddish-brown
leather that he had cadged through a friend in the Air
Force.

“ Morning,” Colin said, in his light way, though it seemed
to Auberon that the lightness was a little haggard or worn.
“ A misty, moisty morning.”

Auberon at least knew every word of the nursery rhymes
that Molly used to sing to him in the years of their first
common bereavement. “ ‘ There I met an old man, clothed
all in leather,’ ” he rejoined, perhaps a little grimly. Colin’s
midnight jaunt puzzled the man who had read his own
commission over very seriously when he became an officer.

330 ROUGH JUSTICE

However — thanks be! — Colin was not under him. “Had
a good night? ” he asked, more sociably.

“ Never ask that,” Colin said, “of the rake-helly cat when
he comes home with the milk. Life is a broken toy, friend
Bron, at these impossible hours.”

There was a little pause till Auberon said, “What about
stowing the car? ”

Colin laughed oddly. “Oh, practical man! Lilies I
bring you, charred in the fire, and roses trampled in mud,
and youth a mistake, and man’s estate a regret, and the brief
candle guttering dirtily out. And you, that know how to
live — you that have beaten us all without knowing it — there
you stand in your virgin glory of innocence, bejewelled with
all the regalia of dawn, and ask lost souls if they hadn’t
better stick cars into stables! Oh, I’ll do it.”

The wild talk blew past Auberon’s mind, or through it,
as other wild winds blow through a tree. “You see,” he
said, “ Brett will be shamming asleep till you’ve run the car
in, lest he have to say who it was.”

“ And you ? ”

“ Better hurry,” said Auberon.

The car moved on at once. “Wait!” Colin said as it
went

II

Auberon went back to his seat at the bridge. He heard
the key grind and the car go in and cease from its labours
and Colin steal across to the Temple of Flora to hang the
key on its nail in the drivers’ mess-room, whence he had
taken it.

Then Colin came back to the bridge and stood opposite
Auberon. “ You understood me? ” Colin asked.

“ I made out you’d been cherching la femme^ as they say.”

“ I found her,” said Colin. “ Victor and her.^’

“ Hullo! ” Auberon stared.

BOOK SEVEN 331

“ Yes,” said Colin, with a queer trace of aghastness in
his voice, through all the rant. “ Vi tor — Adonis — En-
dymion — he that shook Diana hersel-* with his beauty.
He’s serf to an oversexed slut — oh ! a p )lecat, a termagant.
You could see in a twinkling how it h*d happened. The
shrew had been short of a man to clear, pig-sties and serve
her libidinous body. Then Victor came by, and she grabbed
him.”

“ You saw him! ” Auberon exclaimed.

“Yes. And the she- Minotaur. She hung round, growl-
ing and snarling, lest I should carry him oif.”

“ You meant to? ” Admiration mingled with Auberon’s
amazement. To Auberon’s mind, suffused through every
tissue with the pride of willing discipline, the notion of
rescuing Victor from justice had not once occurred, even as
a temptation to be resisted or a possibility to be dismissed.
He thought for a moment and added: “You’d known it
was he? ”

“ Lord! no. I only wanted to cheat Immals out of his
kill, for a lark. Perhaps a bit of fraternity, too, with all
deserters. You see I’ve been the whole-hog embusqui, I
funked the war sooner than any poor devil that has got shot
for it. Ecce signum! ” Colin touched with a finger the
two wide rows of ribbons on his tunic — ribbons of medals
and orders, British and foreign, conferred for the valour he
had not shown — the D.S.O., the Mons Star, the Legion of
Honour, the Russian Order of St. Stanislas, the Roumanian
Order of St. Michael the Brave, the Siamese Order of
Rama for Military Merit, the Croce di Guerra, the order
of the Tower and the Sword — all pledges of his fidelity to
the places where such things most abound. “ Cowards, you
know, shoulder to shoulder. Dastards, tail to tall.”

Again the hot air blew unnoticed past Auberon’s mind,
“ What,” he asked intently, “ could you do with him? ”

33* ROUGH JUSTICE

“ Drop him in the open, anyhow. Run that filthy
hound out of scent.”

“ Did you?”

“ No. He wouldn’t come. He didn’t dare. He’s
broken. Some one had tried, before me, to get him away.
Some one incredible.”

“ Molly? ” Auberon asked, with the talk on the bridge
at Staples rushing back into his mind.

“ How the deuce she got there ! I suppose the way

the shot stags make for the place they were born in.”

“ It’s this ‘ surgical team ’ stunt,” Auberon said. “ He
told you? ”

“ Yes, in a dull, horrible way, with no feeling for her —
like some old invalid who gets cross with anybody that does
a thing for him. I made out that Molly had found a small
kid astray on the road. There was only the one whole
house in sight, so she had carried the kid to the farm —
you know how she looks with a child in her arms? ”

“ Yes.”

“ Shows you the Sistine Madonna was not all my eye.
Old Raphael had seen some one like her.”

“ Yes.”

“ I fancy Victor put his village-idiot face on when she
came in sight. He did it for me too, at first — dribbled
spittle on his chin, and grinned. He told me what happened
next I’ll give you his words, if I can. ‘ She said, “ Victor ! ”
She put the child down quickly and ran to me, crying out,
“Victor!” I couldn’t do anything — there was Louise
looking out of the window. I suppose I just fiddled my
fingers around the rim of my bowler. That stopped her.
She said, “ Something frightful has happened? ” I said,
“Yes. I deserted, years and years ago. I’m in hiding.”
She wouldn’t believe it at first. She kept saying, “ Try hard
to remember. Try to think what really happened. You

BOOK SEVEN

333

were wounded — delirious — you wandered about ” No,

no, I kept telling her — nothing had hit me — I had deserted,
just deserted. Didn’t lots of people des^Tt? Why couldn’t
she see? She really is slow — always was. At last she seemed
to take it in. The child was crying 4nd she took it up
again and it stopped crying and felt ^.bout, all over her
face, with its hands. When she’d tho ught for a time she
said I must go quickly and give rnyselr up — I was to tell
everything, just as it was; then they weald only send me to
prison — she’d wait for me till I came )ut and we’d go to
some place where nobody knew and start all over again.
As if one ever could\ I got tired of hearing her. Seemed
as if she wouldrdi face the facts. “ Can’t you see? ” I said.
“ I’ve got a friend.” I think she began to see then. “ Are
you married? ” she said. She hadn’t any tact, you see. So
I pointed to the child. She put it down gently and kissed
the top of its head, with her face pressed down on it, ruffling
its hair — her face wasn’t in sight for quite a long time. At
last she looked at me and there was nothing wrong with her
face. She wasn’t put out or crying. She just said, “Good-
bye ” and shook hands the way a real friend does — she was
dull, but she had generosity.’ That was his yarn — I think
I’ve remembered it all.”

“ He wouldn’t bolt for it? ” Auberon asked, idly, with
nothing but Molly’s smitten face before his mind.

“ He didn’t dare.”

“ Dare? ”

“ Louise had come out of the house by that time. Some
damned instinct must have told her what I was after. He
took a scared sort of look at the black scowl she had. Then
he said, ‘ I can’t do it.’ ”

“ Was that all? ”

“ No. I got him apart for a second, before I cleared
out. I offered him my revolver, in case he should

334 ROUGH JUSTICE

want a way out. ‘ I’ve filled all the chambers,’ I told
him.”

“ Good ! ” said Auberon, lover of life as he was.

“No. No good at all. She must have seen — it was
pretty near dawn by then, and a grey light coming. She
yelled something I couldn’t make out and he shuffled off in
a hell of a hurry, rubbing his old boots along the ground,
to keep ’em on — they weren’t laced up. I was going — I
was just fording the puddle there is from the dung at these
farms — when I heard a bestial noise in the house — ^ sort
of dog-fighting noise, but with only one dog giving tongue.
I tell you, friend Bron, there are worse noises in Hell than
we wot of. I was sure I heard twice the sound of a whacking
great slap on a face, and then the fury, opened the door and
screamed something foul at my back and my poor old
revolver came whizzing into the dung.”

“ I hope you picked it up,” said Auberon. Thrown into
a shoreless-seeming sea of miseries, he grabbed at the next
thing to see to, the next thing to do, as if it were a plank.
The number of Colin’s revolver was down on some list; if
it were found lying there, Colin, too, would be “ for it.”

“ Yes. Pride wasn’t on, just then. It had not been a
good night for us shirkers. Hullo!” He broke off, to
listen.

“ Yes,” said Auberon. “That’s it.” He had stood up,
impelled by some dim instinct, as if in the presence of the
mystery of death. Distant, almost dreamy, so muted by its
remoteness as not to efface the low sound of the cattle’s
teeth plucking the grass, there had begun in a single instant
the multitudinous rolling of all our innumerable guns.

“ Preliminary bombardment? ” said Colin.

“ No. None to-day. The men start with the guns.
They’ve just started. The men, the men! ” Stung by the
dearness of his mind’s vision, Auberon had begun to walk up

BOOK SEVEN

335

and down and across, on the bridge. Rt.thven and Booker,
Cart and McGurk — he saw the beads c f wet hung by the
fog from McGurk’s big moustache as 'hey advanced, and
Booker saying, “Now we shawn’t be long,” and Cart saying
nothing, but thinking for every one.

“ Is it unbearable, Bron? ” Colin aske

“ What? ”

“ Not to be there — at the centre of everything — where
the flame burns? ”

“ Is that how it takes you? ” said Auberon.

“No. I don’t suflFer. There’s nothing in me to take
light at these times.”

“ You’ve just done what I’d never have dared.”

“ Mere devilry — ^just to do down our friend Immals.
This isn’t your lovely charge, is it? ”

Colonel Nordern, a vision of beauty in horizon-blue and
silver, many gem-like medal ribbons and a loose operatic
cloak of darker blue, was indeed stepping daintily forth to
study the heavens. In half an hour Auberon and he were
crossing the bridge in their car to see what they still could of
the most critical battle of the war. The mist had thinned
already to a kind of atmospheric tenderness that only just
bated the brilliant edge of an unclouded sun.

Ill

As a boy standing on a garden wall looks down on the
lawn below, so did Auberon and Nordern look that morning
from the high northern bank of the Somme, a few miles to
the east of Amiens, and see the war’s greatest battle rolling
swiftly eastwards across the low plain of Santerre, south of
the river. To Auberon, a witness of all our crawling and
fruitless advances of the year before, its swift decisiveness
savoured of miracle. Nothing but a marvel of rushing
victory and happy early peace could save what was left of

336 ROUGH JUSTICE

Victor now: and, lo! here was the marvel; the turn had
come; like a great ship rushing across a hundred miles of
ocean to where a spark that cries for help is sputtering
at the masthead of some small foundering craft, victory
seemed suddenly to have taken wings to fly to Victor’s
deliverance.

For four days Auberon watched the battle rolling over the
level plain: in two the enemy was driven back twelve miles;
by the fourth he had lost 400 guns; more than twenty
thousand of his men were prisoners. Then, like some
capricious-seeming tempest, the battle was suddenly stayed;
it rolled away to the south, and for four days Auberon and
Nordern heard, like the receding thunder after storms, the
distant roar of the French guns that covered Humbert’s
infantry while they re-took the Lassigny plateau, and then,
for four days more, the still more distant guns of Mangin
driving the enemy oflF the heights between the Oise and the
Aisne. At last, on August 20, the uproar died away in the
far south, only to break out next day in the north, when the
Third and the Fourth British Armies launched the attack
that was to carry them within ten days across the whole of
the thrice-fought battle-field of the Somme, right over the
dividing ridge between the rivers of Northern France and the
great plain of Central Europe. And then, as before, the
prosperous battle was checked in full course; silence fell on
Bapaume and P^ronne while, farther north again, the din
rose east of Arras and the British First Army hustled the
enemy back, through the great outwork of his Drocourt-
Qu&nt switch, into the elongated fortress of the Hindenburg
Line. And yet, once more, as, it might have seemed, the
cup of victory was put down undrained, the centre of the war
shifted and from the extreme south, just within hearing, there
came, on September 12, reverberations of gun-fire in the east
of the Argonne — the voice of the First American Army as it

BOOK SEVEN

337

encircled and captured the high fortalice of St Michel,
perched above the twisting Meuse.

All the British share in these swiftly consecutive operations
Auberon carefully showed to the guests c f the British Com-
mander-in-Chief. He never had a day < fF, nor a chance to
look in at Vaurignies and ferret for new' of Victor. Now
and then a day would be wasted in takin^^* one of his charges
back to Boulogne, putting him on the Staff boat for Folkestone
and picking another up at the gangway of the boat next to
arrive. During these days he felt a dread lest the war should
go wrong and lose pace while his back was turned to it. We
were winning; that was sure; England was safe; but were
we winning fast enough to save Victor? Part of this anxiety,
no doubt, he carried in his friendly face on his countless visits
to the Staffs of Corps, Divisions, Brigades, batteries and
battalions, to introduce his companion of the moment or to
ask would they be in any one’s way if they went to some good
advanced observation post that he knew of.

By these visits he had made many acquaintances, and the
cheerful looks with which they all greeted his coming puzzled
him, since he always seemed to be bothering people for some-
thing. However, he made the most of his chances of picking
up tips about war from these genial generals and colonels.
He wanted furiously now to learn about war. He had only
seen fighting, a sight which tells you nothing about strategy,
though it does about some other things. It came to him now
that he had got to see large, in a sense, in order to judge
what chance Victor might have. He must get the knack of
making out what this or that bit of fighting was for, as a part
of the whole war — what distant operations had to do with
one another — how some indecisive battle far away south in
Champagne might still be the means of clearing the Belgian
coast or making the Germans go back from a salient north
of Armentiferes. For weeks he questioned the wise when-

z

338 RlOUGH JUSTICE

ever he met them, and pondered deeply when alone, till at
last, with the suddenness of a heel slipping into a tight riding-
boot, he came to get the hang of what was going on.

IV

It came to him in a parable, as it were. He seemed to see
a crowd of men gathered in front of a long, closed canvas tent
and trying to break into it, while other men, crowded inside
and not seeing through, were trying to keep them out. A
few of the men outside were told off to make a rush at one
point in the wall of the tent, drive their fists into it, make it
bulge inwards and scare the defenders into thinking that here
was to be the assailants’ main and final attempt to break right
through the canvas. So the defenders would crowd to that
spot and tire themselves with frantic efforts to keep the tent
wall from being pressed in to the point of breaking. Then
the fellow in command outside would order a few of his men
to beat against the tent wall at a different place, and the
garrison would stampede in alarm from the first dent in the
canvas to the second, there to tire themselves a bit more, only
to find their cause for alarm reappearing in a third place and
a fourth and so on, as soon as the bout before had left them
breathless and weary.

By September 25 the long wall of the tent had been
battered, now here and now there, in effect everywhere.
The canvas was tough j the fellows behind it were stout;
they had rushed hither and thither to draw it taut as often
as our incalculable buttings against it made it belly or sag.
But, all August and September, it was wearing thin; the
men behind must be terribly tired. And our men were
tremendous; they did incredible things; they bluffed their
way through seeming certainties of death, flung themselves
into extinction, without a thought or a tremor, as people
will do to get a child out of a building on fire. With a

BOOK SEVEN

339

tumultuous exaltation Auberon gazed at the embattled crowd
of Nottingham and Derby clerks slither: ng down one grassy
bank of the deep canal cutting near Bellit ourt, swimming and
wading across the canal and scramblii g — the remnant of
them — up the far bank to storm the entr nched machine guns
that spouted from its summit. The whole war was moving
faster than ever. It was racing furioi.sly. And Auberon
had a sense of looking on at some heroic race, a rush to bring
off a rescue almost past hope. It was is if the S.O.S. that
his agonised fear for Victor sent up ( n that night in the
Vaurignies meadow had set the whole front glistening with
the stars of answering rockets. A tropical growth of new
hope began in his mind; he felt as if he were almost in the
confidence of some vast overruling force that, with a god’s
disregard of mere human equity, changed the course of the
greatest of wars to bring salvation to one poor deserter,

V

But victory still has her price. In her most prosperous
tide you will find an eddy here and there set twisting back
against the flood by some snag or boulder. Even when
Gideon’s trumpets were blowing and all the lamps flaming
free, there must have been stout men of Midian who would
not flee from Jehovah himself without turning to stab a few
of his favourites first.

On a morning late in September Auberon had to escort to
the front a kind old Roumanian general who desired to see
our infantry at their work. Auberon knew a good place;
it was quite close to St. Quentin; for there his own Comfies
had just gone into the line to share in this morning’s attack
on a German “ key position ” of some little tactical value.
For General Robiescu any troops would do; so Auberon
might as well try to see his old friends.

He found them, without any trouble. The ground which

340 ROUGH JUSTICE

they had attacked was much broken — a good place to hold
and a hard one to take. The Germans were out of it now,
for the last time, but the fight of a few hours before must
have swayed to and fro for a while and enemy counter-
attacks had momentarily recovered some points taken by the
impetuous advance of British troops not strong enough at
first to keep them.

Where one of these freakish eddies had curled for an hour
or two and had then been smoothed out by the rising tide of
our advance, Auberon found his friends. They lay in a
short length of sunk road, with broken apple-trees over it —
Cart, Ruthven, Booker, McGurk and five or six more.
The sun was already hot on the place; hundreds of insolent
flies rose from the bodies, buzzing resentfully at Auberon’s
approach, and then quickly crowded into the blackening
gashes again and feasted silently. All, he could see, had
died by the bayonet; not very many men did, in the whole
of the war, but the few were not to be mistaken ; Auberon
would have known them anywhere by the impossible con-
tortions of their bodies, their spines grotesquely bent, their
last wrigglings of agony capriciously arrested in the most
fantastic poses and then petrified thus by the coming on of
rigidity; their faces, too, were different — more horror in
the look; their wide eyes stared more wildly up at the sky,
as if the last of their thoughts had been, “ And so there is
no God.”

These were my friends,” he said to the Balkan general.
He must not disown these poor guys that looked as if some
devil had carved them in grinning contempt of human
dignity and courage. “ My first comrades, in my regiment.”

The general looked at the thick outer ring of grey-coated
enemy dead surrounding the little inner ring of khaki-clad
grotesques. Not being English, and yet being a man, and
a kind one, he drew himself up, saluted, and said, “They

BOOK SEVEN

341

were comrades for a King.” He touched his guide’s
vacant sleeve. “ And you, my friend, a comrade for such
men.”

For a moment Auberon had lost sf -ht of the war as a
whole and the working out of the great Foch’s design. It
was only as if these dear fellows had seen The Beak in mortal
danger and rushed in only too headlong, to help an old friend.
So it had been at all these fights; so had the wounded died
at Bellicourt when they rolled down the canal banks into
the water and great bubbles had risen trom their lips while
they died. Everywhere men were dying in order that some-
thing might live. Something better than they? Plodding
and honest in all his secret thoughts, like a workman who
works as well with his master’s back turned, Auberon did
not try to make out to himself that a life so hopelessly broken
as Victor’s was worth a life like Alf Cart’s. No, the
world’s best were perishing still, just as the best of them all
had perished on the Cross, on some dim chance that this
might do good to those who were worse.

And yet, could one be rational and set one’s face against
that mad waste and unreason of atonement, with all its
squandering of perfection, just to preserve the imperfect ?
Could he, if the power were his, give the order that Victor
must die in shame rather than he should be saved by sacrifices
like this ? He asked it, as straight as he could, of himself.
But no clear answer came, only a mental flinching away
from the thought of Molly hearing of Victor’s end. It was
like seeing her face bashed in with the butt; the horror of
it paralysed all reasoning; anything sooner than that! And
might it not possibly be that, if God loved all the world as
he himself loved Molly and Victor, God would feel some-
thing like that and might be ready to give a part of himself
to relieve the most worthless poor devil from some sort of
annihilation. Oh! it was all very difficult

CHAPTER XXIV

I

T he night was moonless but fine, with a good show
of stars, when Auberon’s dusty car turned out of the
great road into the avenue at Vaurignies — past ten
o’clock on the 27th of September. His nice Roumanian
had just sailed from Boulogne and no one else had to be met
there till the late afternoon of to-morrow. Auberon was to
have a night’s holiday.

The lighted house, its background of forested hill, the
familiar trees of the avenue and the bickering of the little
lasher under the bridge had a kind of friendliness; like some
early home revisited after a good many years and much
complicating experience, they seemed to have kept a sim-
plicity lost by himself. By Jove, he felt old ; had he, perhaps,
lived through more than he knew since the 7th of August?
He had been a bit worried, of course; but what people
involved in tragic messes in books suffered was evidently
something much more severe and important.

His car crossed the bridge; the noise of the lasher lessened
behind him; little sounds from the house rose into clearness.
The night was warm; many windows were open; more
lamps were burning than usual; two cars with ardent head-
lights stood at the door; there must be guests to-night. Yes,
several voices poignant with the wasted beauty of marred
youth were soon drivelling sloppily out into the night from
a window— one of the speakers quite drunk, another less
drunk, a third and fourth not really drunk, but pretending.
“ Wha’ the hell car’s that? ” “ Tha’ my car? ” “ Gosh !

or Garth’s car! ” “ 01 ’ man Garth, back from the wars! ”

“Good ol’ Garth!” “Come in, Garth.” “Have a
d-d-drink, Garth.”

He knew the guests — four subalterns of a cavalry regiment

34a

BOOK SEVEN

343

that used to have rest billets in the villag !, off and on. But
nobody from the mess seemed to be see ng them off; they
were just trickling out by themselves, t > go home. That
was odd. What were all their hosts doin .5? Well, here was
something that had to be done. The} must be seen off,
before he went in.

Slowly, with many maudlin farew- II cordialities, the
cavaliers passed away into the night, an 1 Auberon stood at
the chateau door, as his father did at home, waiting till
parting guests should be too far away to hear the door
close behind them.

While he stood so, a light appeared at the end of the
avenue, moved obliquely for a moment and then straightened
its course and drew in on the house. He knew what that
was — the despatch-rider bringing the post of the day — late
because of the late tide that was timing Auberon’s trips to
Boulogne to-day and to-morrow. Round the curving drive,
within the near gates, the head-light of the urgent motor-
cycle wheeled like the revolving flash of a lighthouse,
searching with its whirling brilliance a great arc of a circle
of limestone wall, gravel and verdure.

Auberon said a word to the rider. Corporal Tolley — was
his machine running all right, or stiff in the steerage again?

“ Champion, Sir, thank you,” the corporal said. “ I’ve
two letters for you. Sir,” he added. He searched in his bag,
holding it under his head-light.

By that light Auberon saw on one letter the writing of
Molly. He put it into his pocket unopened. On no
moments but the most worthy was reading such as that to
be conferred. He made straight for the room where he had
left Immals talking, the night the smash came.

344

ROUGH JUSTICE

II

It was horrible. It was as if Immals had never got up
and gone, in all those seven weeks. There he was, exactly
as before, still befouling the air. Just such another court of
listeners, too, was round him now as in August — two of
them, in fact, the same, and the rest like them — a chubby
Staff-lieutenant up from a base, a Corps-Commander’s A. D.C.
and two or three pretty children whom some potent relation
or other had not had the heart to send through the fire to
honour; they hung upon Immals’ lips, while he tickled
them with drams and snacks of his Grand Guignol muck.
His face looked fouler than ever — more pouchy under the
eyes, more blackish-green, nearer to black altogether than
when Colin had said, A judge only puts on a tiny black
cap, but Immals blacks his whole mug.” And yet Auberon
had to listen, hungrily, just on the chance. For nobody
could tell as much as this carrion crow of what Auberon
hungered to learn,

Immals, of course, was spinning some yarn of the knacker’s
yard that he kept. When Auberon came in, the pink lads
looked round, rather shamefaced, as if an acquaintance had
caught them looking eagerly on at some filthy affair in a
street instead of kicking the offender.

“ Cheerio, Immals,” Auberon said — he was a host in this
mess and the barbaric virtue had to be practised, even to crows
whose trade was to pick out the eyes of sick sheep. “ Had
a good day? ”

“ Damned long un,” said Immals. He was only a coarse
artist; he laboured crudely his air of grim significance.

“ Up at dawn, you know,” the A. D.C. babbled. His
girlish mouth was defaced with a laugh that tried to be
knowing: really it was hysterical.

Immals resumed his interrupted debauch. “ I was just

BOOK SEVEN

345

saying,” he said, and went on. Auberor, a little aloof from
the group, riddled with Punch and listene d furtively, just on
the chance.

“ I don’t know,” Immals was saying, ‘ what other Armies
may do, but we find it best in this Army to use a small,
cobble-paved yard that I struck, with a good high wall
round it. Keeps ’em more quiet — to ft el they’re shut in —
see? They’re not all like this freak that: we put through it
to-day. They’re not nuts on being don • in.”

So some poor rat or other had only asked to be in the pit
with the terriers — ^just to be out of it all. Gosh! what a
life the poor beast must have had.

Immals talked on. “ We keep the sun out, in this Army.
Makes ’em jib, to see it — they don’t want to leave it.”

The Staff-lieutenant asked some question too husky for
Auberon to hear it

“ No,” Immals answered. “ In this Army our firing-
party is ten. Two of ’em fire with blank — not one — that’s
only in story-books. No, the men don’t load the rifles they
use — if they did they’d know who had the blank.”

“ What about the fouling, though? The barrel’s dif-
ferent after firing blank,” the Staff-lieutenant insisted, as
though he had just heard that he was to be one of the firing-
party himself.

“ That’s seen to, of course,” replied Immals. “ The men
ground arms the moment they’ve fired. Then they’re
marched out. Then the rifles are shuffled and other men
clean ’em.”

“ Seems good enough,” the A.D.C. admitted guardedly.

Immals looked at the pink youth as if he had certified
God to be just fit, perhaps, to run errands. “ All the
trouble this morning,” Immals went on austerely, “ came
of a fool of a new sergeant-major. You’d hardly believe it
— he had forgotten the gas-mask? ”

346 ROUGH JUSTICE

“Gas-mask?” The cherubic A.D.C. almost gasped,
“ What’s that for? ” he said.

Immals stared at such innocence. “ Why, of course.”
he said, “ for this swine Nevin.”

Ill

“ Shock ” is a curious thing. It may flurry or calm you;
bend you to the point of breaking or straighten you up;
knock the pert off their perches and put the shy at their
ease. In the moment of hearing Victor’s name Auberon
seemed to have time for long trains of thought; all that
there was to ponder lay spread out at once before his mind
like the many rivers and towns that you see from a ’plane
which flies high in clear weather. Victor dead utterly now,
and the last smear daubed on his name; Molly to be guarded,
if it might be, from the sear of this branding-iron — he almost
heard it hissing into her flesh while she stood white and still,
abiding fate. What did they do in these cases? Tell a
man’s next-of-kin? Or was there some regular lie? Were
the Victors simply gazetted as “ Died”? Oh, no — why, of
course, he had often seen the dead bodies nailed up, names
and all, in General Orders. He could see Victor’s epitaph:

GENERAL ROUTINE ORDERS
by

F.M. Sir Douglas Haig, G.C.B., G.C.V.O., K.C.I.E.,

C. in C. British Armies in France.

Adjutant-Generar s Branch,

Courts Martial,

No. 89507 Private V. F. J. Nevin was tried by Field General

Court Martial on the following charge:

“ When on Active Service, deserting His Majesty’s Service.”

The accused absented himself from near the front line in

BOOK SEVEN

347

November 1915, and remained absent till apprehended in a
place behind the line in September 1918 ; he was then in civilian
clothes, without identity-disc or pay-book.

The sentence of the court was “To suffer death by being
shot.”

The sentence was duly carried out at 5.5 1 a.m. on September
27, 1918.

But now he must go on parade, with his face turned to
wood, and pump Immals while he was there to be pumped:
for Victor might have said something, left some message — a
letter perhaps.

Immals was saying how “ in this Army ” the plan was to
blindfold the prisoner by putting a gas-mask over his head,
with the eye windows round at the back. “ It’s much more
use than a hanky. Covers the whole of his face, so the
men can’t see the face working. Sure to put ’em off if they
do. As a matter of fact, it’s what happened to-day.”

“ Did he say things? ” Auberon asked. With conscious
cunning he aped the laboured callousness of Immals’ puny
courtiers.

“ Lord, no! We’ve stopped all that in this Army, ages
ago. Some of ’em used to make a hell of a noise — praying
and talking. It put the men off. So now we put cotton-
wool in their mouths.”

“What did go wrong, then?” the A.D.C. breathlessly
asked.

“ The blighter’s face kept working,” Immals said. His
voice was changing. “ Flicking like hell,” he snarled, with
a queer, rising fury. “Putting the men off — the scab! —
so that only one bullet hit him — one out of eight — ^and
that only in the shoulder! The swine was not even
stunned ! Wide-awake as I am, and that bloody face of his,
working! ”

548 ROUGH JUSTICE

“ And then? ” Auberon asked. Once driven to it, he
acted morbid curiosity quite decently well.

“ Usual routine. March the men off. A.P.M. finishes
prisoner. Revolver well into the mouth — muzzle turned
slightly upwards. 1 didn’t take long with the cur.”

Just for an instant Auberon closed his eyes, to see the
brains that had spun Victor’s delicate fabrics of fancy and
wit bespatter the wall of the slaughterer’s yard. The
chubby Staff-lieutenant may have had imagination too, for
he went quickly to one of the open windows, put his head
out and was sick over a Malmaison rose that grew against
the south wall. But Auberon had business in hand. “ He
said nothing at all? ” he asked Immals again.

“ We don’t ask ’em,” said Immals, “ to make a last
speech from the cart.’’

Without making the action uncivilly pointed, Auberon
fetched a bottle from the sideboard. “ A bit drappie? ” he
asked Immals politely, and Immals held out his tumbler.

“ Say when,” said Auberon, as he poured, but Immals
fell into abstraction till the common strength of grog had been
well passed : then he suddenly said, “ Enough ! enough ! ”
like a man rebuking some excess that nobody could have
expected. While Immals added soda-water with a frugal
hand, Auberon said, “ He left no message, or letter, or
anything? Some of ’em do, I suppose? ”

“ Some of ’em — yes. Only the other day there was one
— a second-lieutenant — we shot him for cowardice. He sat
up writing letters by a flash-lamp, all the night before —
four long uns, all to his mother, with dates on ahead, full of
all sorts of lies about the great time he was having. He
asked my Sergeant-Major to post ’em, at intervals of a week.

* That’ll give her a good month,’ he said. But not this
swab to-day.”

“ He did nothing at all? ”

BOOK SEVEN

349

“ He just went to hell, the bloody scut, working his
jaws.” Immals spoke savagely, and his blackish - green
complexion had grown blacker; convulsive twitchings and
clenchings wrenched its flaccid musclts. The man was
screwing himself up to a species of retrospective fury, work-
ing up in his neurotic little soul a spasm of lust for killing
without danger to himself. Auberon had seen men look
like that. Once, when the Comfies 1 ad taken a trench,
he had seen a man trampling frenzied / upon a wounded
German’s face, stringing himself up with shouts of incoherent
rage and filth to grind the agonised features into a jelly of flesh,
mud, blood and smashed bone till the body ceased wriggling.

But now he had got what information there was. He
must go and think what could be done.

IV

He made for a small room, that he and a few other con-
ducting officers used as a place of refuge from social activity
in their few hours off duty. No one was there; the empty
room had a welcoming look, with a shaded oil lamp on the
table, and big pine logs burning bright on the open hearth
with small noises of hissing and crackling from the damp
wood and the dry. Outside the little zone of steady lamp-
light and that of the flickering firelight the room was dark;
through a slit between the drawn curtains Auberon saw
some chilly-looking stars. Out of doors a wind was rising;
it pressed fitfully on the windows; it whined round a corner
and sniffed at cracks.

Auberon drew a chair near the fire and sat gazing at the
flames, loving them. He had always loved fires — the very
idea of fires; his old trench life, with its bouts of bruising,
quelling, spirit-crushing cold, had added to that love. What-
ever changed, whatever failed, fires were friendly and good
,to you.

350 ROUGH JUSTICE

Something had happened since he came into the room.
There was nothing at once to be done; and, with nothing to
do, his endurance was collapsing. The manner of Victor’s
death hurt him dreadfully now; the pain of it filled mind
and heart just as the pain of bitter cold occupies the
whole body, brutalises and cows it, torments all your flesh
with dull tortures like toothache, drags you down to be a
mere mass of spiritless animal tissues without courage or
hope.

He sat perfectly still and gazed hard at the fire: he gave
himself wholly up to mere consciousness of its kind heat; he
made all other thoughts wait; presently, presently, he would
come to them; all that he could do with, as yet, was this
shining assurance that something unbedevilled remained in
the world.

Like blood taking motion again in a man numbed with
cold, animation slowly returned to Auberon’s mind. It
fumbled about, feebly at first; it groped round for good
things to take hold of; he thought of roofs that keep out the
winter, of new milk and the brown Autumn goodness of wide
fields of corn, and the sunshine of June mornings in England;
and then of some of the men he had known— -his father and
Cart and McGurk and Black, men of the breed who eagerly
gave the world more than they took at its hands; and then
the thought of all these seemed to lead up to the thought of
Molly and culminate in her. With a new clearness he saw
her, not in her beauty only but as the most perfect, for him,
of all the world-saving souls that are as utterly simple,
constant and kind as fires and stars. Then he remembered
her letter, took it out and read it by the mixed light of the
lamp and the fire.

The letter had come amazingly fast; it was dated only
that day.

BOOK SEVEN

35 *

Dear Bron,

I’m a beastie, not to have written before No excuse, either,
for work has eased off, only too much. H’he “surgical team”
work was hard. Once, when we were at Ranvert I’^tang, my
surgeon did big operations for thirty-six hou s on end. He’d stop
for five minutes, to eat, and then go on aga a. I want work like
that — ^just to go pegging on at something f imdrum that’s worth
while. It seems to keep things real. Ev^r feel that way? I
had a bad dream about you — ^not dead c r wounded, but just
looking lost, as if you felt things weren’t real.

I have a new job now — a ward full of men who are said to
have wounded themselves — all under arrest. There’s an armed
guard at the door of the tent, and barbed wire all round. They’re
just like other wounded — heartrendingly obliged by the least thing
one does. Most of them were volunteers, like you. One had a
D.C.M. They’ll all be tried as soon as they’re patched up—
perhaps shot.

I wonder what’s right. Of course they have failed — tried to
do more than they could, and broken down over it. Still, they
did try — they took their chance of losing their courage as you lost
your arm. I almost think they’re the most horribly wounded of
all and have given up most — become idiots or cowards and not
cripples only, through having tried to do right.

I don’t say they shouldn’t be punished. Punishment is such a
mystery. At school, when I’d done something rotten, I used to
feel, in a way, that I had a right to be punished — it would be
almost cruel if one were let off — it would be like not letting you
have any soap if you made your face dirty. But one thing I’m
sure of — it’s rotten to punish them first and then to treat them as
if the punishment itself didn’t clear them — as if they were “ un-
touchables ” still and ought to be cut in the street, or hushed up
if they’re dead. Don’t you believe in expiation? I do — a, sort of
utter washing away of whatever was wrong by a scalding stream
of clean pain, so that at last you can be as if no wrongness had ever
come in.

Does this only read like the stuff people talk who throw word

35* ROUGH JUSTICE

about without caring? I do mean it, but can’t explain better,
80 please make sense of it. If we could only see everything just
as it is, the way they say that God can, I do believe that we might
be touched most of all, long after this war, by the thought of those
men who had died in the worst torment of all that there are,
because they were too weak to bear as much as they had tried to
bear for the sake of us all.

Must stop— here comes an interruption, and my letter only just
begun. Are you all right ? I am.

Your affectionate

Molly.

Had she known that Victor was dead when she wrote?
Or only that he had been taken? Or only what he knew
her to have known although she did not know that he knew
it? One, at least, of .these torturing pieces of knowledge
must have been wringing her while she wrote? Perhaps the
worst of all. But she would not let on. She still left her
young brother such chance as he had of not knowing what
Victor had done; and also she tried to arm him with any
thought that might help him against the first onset of horror
and grief, if he should come to find out. That was what
Molly could do, under torture. He read her letter again.
With her world darkened about her, she was like that, and
the thought of her cleaned a soiled earth ; it kept life noble.

He did not try to answer her now. They hardly ever
answered each other’s letters at once. If he did it to-night
she might guess that he knew her secret, or part of it; he
must leave it to her, to tell or keep, as freely as mig^t be
possible. He went out to his bed in the meadow, a man
revived; for fortitude like Molly’s is not used up in the act
of enduring blows: it remains a great fire and lamp, like a
sun, and lights and warms and vitalises all that it shines on.

CHAPTER XXV

I

N ext evening Auberon went bac k: to work. In the
twilight he met the Staff boat at Boulogne, detected
at the gangway’s foot the famous author whom he was
to pilot, whisked him off in a car by the coast road through
Hardelot Forest and Camiers and fed 1 im, amidst kitchen
savours and steams, at the little thron ged inn at Staples.
Then on through a mild autumn night, across darkened
Montreuil, to undulate over the rumpled downland till they
dropped steeply down to the deserted streets of Abbeville
with its many searchlights patrolling the infested sky, and
so by Flixecourt and Picquigny, up the narrowing Somme
to Amiens, where they slept at the battered Hotel du Rhin.
Next day they took to the long straight-ruled road that
passes through Albert, Bapaume, Cambrai and Valenciennes
to Mons.

Auberon had to talk for most of the time. Like the
servant who shows tourists round a great house, he had to
be ready with something about whatever his charges might
notice by the way. At first this had been a sad trial.
Nothing at school or the University had suggested that
history or architecture was a study worthy of any person of
spirit. That of architecture might even conduce to long
hair. But when he started work as pilot to the British front
he noticed distinctly that the Army’s foreign guests, of all
nations, were impressed by the number of times he had to
answer their enquiries with “ Sorry — I don’t know the first
thing about it.” So his inveterate habit, in trouble, of
finding absorption and relief in the obvious next thing to do
had set him mugging up in his spare hours — mostly in guide-
books — quite a lot of subjects on which his education had
thrown a minimum of light.

a A

353

354 ROUGH JUSTICE

After some labour he had been able to show his various
travelling companions the house where Napoleon had stayed
at fitaples to plan the invasion of England with Ney; also
the house where Robespierre (of whom Auberon knew
nothing else) was born in Arras. He had explored in free
hours the Forest of Crdcy, knew where to find the wild
boars and could show their sows trotting swiftly along its
open glades, with their litter galloping astern. He had
worried out, from Shakespeare and Baedeker, the plan of the
battle of Agincourt — and this was particularly useful, because
the battle-field lay within sight of the chateau where most of
the Army’s guests were put up. At architecture, too, he
had swotted till it became so exciting to himself that he was
afraid lest he should bore people with it. Whenever he took
his military attach^ and others up to the front by the great
road from the coast near Montreuil to French Flanders he
cautiously fished to find out whether they cared about
houses; if so he would gently indicate the funny little air
of Spanishness that some of the houses had at Hesdin, and
more of them at St. Pol, and any number of them at Arras,
where the Dons, he understood, had had it all their own way
once and had then tried to push a bit west, but had had to
come back. Finding some of his charges to be wearied by
off days in Amiens, with no battles to amuse them, he had
got up the interesting truths that the “ House of the Sagit-
taire,” in the Rue des Vergeaux, was held to be the true
Renaissance stuff, and that Number 7 in the Rue St. Martin
was reckoned a topping specimen of Louis Quinze, and
Number 18 of Louis Seize. With a round of these objets
(Tart he would endeavour to entertain the guests of Britain,
though alwa}^ with extreme caution, as a man of indifferent
education trading on a minute capital of knowledge.

This time there was no daylight wherein to practise
aesthetics, as far as Amiens. And next morning, when there

BOOK SEVEN

355

was daylight, there were no buildings 1« ft to practise them
on, after the car had gone a few miles fa rther east. So that
peace which the world cannot give had t » be sought through
sustained efforts to impart purely militarv information. Up
and down this long straight road, he explained, to and fro
between Albert and Mons, the war 1 ad drifted its four
years; it was the axis of the war, at an) rate for us; it was
the centre line, as it were, of the lawn-t mnis court. Up it
the British Regular Army had marched, full of hope, in the
August of 1914. Back along it the Germans had pushed
them, only to recede along it themselve. in their turn after
their check on the Marne; all the long battle of the Somme
in 1916 had been fought astride of this road; eastwards
along it the Germans had retreated under cover of night in
the wintry early months of 1917 and westwards they had
crowded back in their last great advance, in the following
March; eastwards again along the same road they had for two
months now been falling back. The flowing and ebbing
tides of war had littered the great highway with their
leavings, Auberon pointed them out. Its shining smooth-
ness was the tarmac that British labour battalions had laid
in the spring of last year for our advancing transport, and
this spring the Germans’ advancing transport had taken over
the job of polishing it. Everywhere by the road were
notices to troops in English or in German; on the ruins of
wooden huts that both armies had shelled in succession,
there could still be read “ Y.M.C.A.” and “ Soldatenheim,”
“ Zur res. Stellung ” and “ Delousing Station.” On each
side, wastes of blasted heath, an endless-looking veldt of
thistles and poppies and self-sown traces of old peace-time
harvests of beet and mustard and corn, were speckled, as far
as their eyes could see, with two other innumerable growths
that looked as if they too must be some common weed — two
diflFerent species of rude wooden crosses standing, at every

356 ROUGH JUSTICE

rickety angle, over the dead that lay shallowly buried where
they fell, the British crosses small and paintless, the German
ones larger, heavier, with little eaved and painted roofs at
their tops to keep the rain from washing out the name of
the man that “ hier ruht,” as each of them said.

II

All these things did Auberon continue to show and inter-
pret, at first perhaps a little mechanically — it was the thing
to do next; it was his job; that was all. Then the exercise
warmed his numb mind: he began, for the moment, to lose
himself in it, as in the old games of football at school, that
could keep care away for a while: he grew eager and vivid,
as many simple people do when they tell you of things that
they know by sight and not through books. And while he
did his best to show how the war stood, it became strangely
clear to himself; his mind, which no one had ever taught to
see all the parts of any great thing in their wholeness and
unity, was educating itself. He could see now, by dint of
having to show some one else, what the German army’s
predicament was.

Till lately it had fought on ground that was as good as a
part of Germany’s own great square self. But now that
ground was changing swiftly into a peninsula, with two seas
eating eagerly into its neck on each side — striving to turn it
into an island cut off. One great line of railway was the
real neck of that peninsula. A mighty system of railways
fed the German front, reinforced it, carried its wounded
away and kept open its line of retreat. At Liege that system
was gathered together into one east-and-west line as vital as
the umbilical cord to a child yet unborn. East of Liege and
west of Liege the system of railway spread itself out like a
fan: at Liege it was as single to cut as a throat. And, once
it was cut, all the German armies still left in the peninsula

BOOK SEVEN

357

that had turned island would have to surrender, however
brave they might be.

What struck in this way the untutored mind of Auberon
was even clearer, no doubt, to the sup< r-trained talents of
LudendorfF and Hindenburg. Only th< day before Victor
was shot, these two had added themselves to the forces
unconsciously endeavouring to keep hi n alive: they had
told their Kaiser that peace must now !3e offered at once:
it was hopeless, they warned the poor wretch on the throne,
to keep up the war. But the doomed egoist shrank from
his own fall more than he did from letting ten or twenty
thousand extra men be killed for nothing: so there came no
rest for fighting men, nor amnesty for deserters, till Victor
had been six weeks in his grave.

Ill

During those weeks it was Auberon’s job to show the
working-out of Foch’s plan to many august civilians as well
as the brisk and trim military attaches of the Allied and the
neutral world. Some of the civilians were old friends.
Wynnant was invited out to G.H.Q. because he knew every
one there and was famous good company anywhere; Roads
because he might bite unless he were constantly stroked;
Wade because the old Radical was believed to be shaky as
an upholder of war “ to the bitter end,” and a sight of
the actual thing might brace up his moral\ Ducat because
the elegant “ war work ” of his tongue and pen for four
whole years was held to merit reward: so just was G.H.Q.,
so politic, so penetrating in its knowledge of the human
heart.

They all looked at the great sight with eyes that saw
almost nothing. From far south, in the Argonne and
Champagne, Americans and French were thrusting north-
ward, digging furiously towards Li^ge, turning the menaced

358 ROUGH JUSTICE

peninsula’s neck into an even narrower isthmus. And
meanwhile, all along the peninsula’s broad western face,
French and English, Belgians and Americans were cease-
lessly trying to penetrate to some point or other on the line
of railway running north and south, behind the German
front and parallel with it, through Brussels, Mons, Maubeuge,
Hirson, Meziferes, Sedan and Metz — to cut it and so to
prevent the Germans from reaching the isthmus before it
was severed. Pershing drove at Sedan, and Gouraud at
Mezieres, Haig at Mons and Maubeuge, and King Albert
at Brussels through Ghent. By October i the whole of
the Allied front roared and winked with the most continuous
flashing and din in the whole war. For more than a month
the great climax held on, incredibly, like a top note sustained
for that time by some Supernatural voice, till in the first days
of November the American troops fought their way into
Sedan, the British took Maubeuge, the French were at
Hirson, and Belgian outposts east of Tronchiennes were
looking across a few flooded fields at the towers of Ghent.
The substance of victory had been won; the peninsula’s
neck was ours to cut when we chose; even of the peninsula
the enemy’s troops had no longer the run; nothing remained
but to claim the formal and full admission of defeat by the
most multitudinous surrender in history.

Auberon’s old acquaintances saw little of this; they had
no wish to see; their eyes were turned inward and all their
feasting was on visions got up by themselves and suffused
with home-made colours. Ducat seemed to regard the
whole war as an occasion to which the English upper classes
had risen memorably. Forty-seven eldest sons of peers, he
bade Auberon mark, had fallen in the first year alone. He
had by heart a list of famous houses to which they had been
heirs, and he described the family portraits. His voice
almost broke as he pictured a Duchess of his acquaintance

BOOK SEVEN

359

getting up at half-past five in the m(*rning in her own
house for hospital work, and the Di ke commanding a
training camp under his ancestral oaks — “ I don’t believe
there’s a single draft to the front that th^ Duke does not see
off.” Even the younger sons of noble ? imilies — even those
who might in youth have been thoug it a little idle and
careless — well, look at Colin March — ^diat Socialist orator
bore on his breast such proofs of gallantr r as Colin March?

Then there came Wynnant, immer sely tickled by the
fervour of certain feuds that would sea cely allow some of
the politicians and generals to attend to the war. Lloyd
George thought Haig a fool, and Haig thought George a
bounder, and Wynnant was told that George had never sent
Haig a word of congratulation or thanks for any of his
recent victories until October 7 — had even sent a message
of doubt and discouragement at a critical time. Haig, of
course, was a man of honour — he wouldn’t retort by in-
triguing in the Press as French had done when Kitchener
had tried to put some guts into him. But our High Com-
mand as a whole! And our diplomacy too! It would be
sport to see whether upper-class England could live down this
failure. “ I suppose it can all be hushed up — French’s flight
and Rawly’s cropper in igi6 and the way Hubert Gough
was deserted in March, and all the little games played by
jackeens like Colin and Claude — why Colin has more re-
wards for valour than any two men in Europe, bar Claude,
and the last German he saw was Lichnowski in 1913.”

The whole war, win or lose, scandalised Clement Wade.
A world that had produced anything so revolting aggrieved
him. His manner towards it was a kind of perpetual
washing of hands. He had no way out to propose, but he
practised an air of aloofness and spoke of universal insanity
and a world rattling back into barbarism. To Auberon it
felt as if he and every one else had turned out to be unsatis-

36 o rough justice

factory sons and Wade was scratching their names out of the
family Bible.

Roads knew what he wanted. It would be monstrous,
he said incessantly, if the war stopped before we gave
Germany a devastated region as big as France’s and Belgium’s
together. Germany had never felt the war yet. We must
march to Berlin, if we had to fight the whole way, dictate
our terms of peace from Potsdam, hang the Kaiser outside
his own door and not come away till we had in our pockets
the whole cost of the war, every penny. Oh, Roads was
very firm.

Auberon heard them all out patiently, as he had heard so
many others, in the last two years, laying down what was
best for the world. “ Take each man’s censure, but reserve
thy judgement”: they could not all be right, as almost
every fluent and masterful speaker had once seemed to be
while he spoke. Auberon only wished he were as sure
about anything as most people seemed to be about every-
thing. The war had let him down, as it had let down most
men of courage and clean heart who fought in it. All the
early exaltation was out of them now, and the approach of
victory was bringing nothing of what their innocence had
expected — no sense of having freed or cleaned a world.
Somewhere in the rear of our Allied armies, scrubby forces
of meanness and cunning, spite and greediness, seemed to be
gathering strength; something foul might be done, after all;
England might yet be made to look like a base boxer who
spits in the eye of the man he has beaten.

The best thing that Auberon’s mind found, to stay itself
on, was the indestructible soundness of the common sort of
man, the stout private who bore all things and dared all
things, undismayed in defeat, sober in victory, humorous,
tolerant and good-natured at bottom, even when he grumbled
most. The only being fit to be ranked with him was the

BOOK SEVEN

361

common German who now had to practise, in hunger and
disillusion, exhaustion and bereavement, the difficult virtue
of courage without hope. Auberon marvelled at the way
the battered German line would draw tight again, like a
piece of string pulled at both ends when it has gone loose
and wavy, after each dint the Allied onslaughts made on it;
here the enemy would fall back, biting -ill the way, from a
salient that had been left jutting out o" his line; there he
would make a furious counter-attack an 1 break off a salient
too boldly thrown out by ourselves. 'I'he nearer the war
drew to its end, the straighter grew taat hard-hammered
line, till on the last day of all it was straighter and shorter
than it had ever been before. It was tremendous, Auberon
thought.

The war’s last morning brought him with our leading
troops into the little grimy town of Mons where, for
England’s armies, the war had begun. It struck eleven on
a little tinkling church clock in the square, and the British
soldiers and the people of the town shook hands and cheered
and tasted all they could of the fulfilment of the deep desire
that had moved them for more than four years, A German
sniper, killed a few hours ago while covering the retreat of
his friends, lay under a tree with his hundreds of used
cartridge-cases scattered round him. He looked lonely
amidst all the rejoicings at the defeat of the cause for which
he had been, perhaps, the last man to die. Like many of
the dead in war, he had a drowsy, troubled look, as if he
had wondered, while dying, “ Why has this overtaken
me?”

Auberon wanted to do what an English private will do in
the ring when he has beaten a plucky opponent at last — put
his arm round the stout loser’s neck and say, “ Good lad ! ”
Why should war be the only ring void of sportsmanship?
And yet this morning’s General Order to cease firing at

362 ROUGH JUSTICE

eleven included a clause forbidding fraternisation. Oh, it
was all very difficult

IV

On the night after that day the stillness that reigned from
Switzerland to the sea kept many soldiers awake. They
were disturbed by the absence of gunfire, as travellers just
ashore from long voyages may be put otF their sleep by
feeling the pulse of no engine throbbing through the walls
of their rooms.

In that restless silence Auberon’s thoughts went round
and round in a circle; they buzzed in his head. Molly and
he would soon be free; they would go home; they could
meet every day if they chose. But would they ever really
meet again — ever be able to talk freely together, in the old
way, with this futile secret between them, that both of them
knew and that each would be trying to keep from the other?
Would she ever be able to think of anything when they
talked, except that he must be kept from knowing that
Victor had not been killed by that shell? Or he of anything
but how to keep from her the way he died six weeks ago?
A fate that was not of their making seemed to be forcing
them into a course of helpless lying — lies of omission,
silence and evasion; and instinct told him already how a
lasting lie lodged in the vitals of a friendship must corrode
the tissues all round it. Molly might come to dislike him,
to fear him, as the person to whom there was most danger
that Victor’s shame might be known. Why, she might
come to wish he were dead, lest he know. But what to do?
What to say? Nothing. To say nothing was all he could,
decently do. And yet to say nothing would be to tell tacit
lies, and lying was poison to friendship; so it all went round
again in his head till morning came.

It brought the news that his father was not recovering as
fast as had been hoped from one of the heart seizures that

BOOK SEVEN

363

he had recently had. “ Is there a cha ice,” he wrote, “of
your getting leave soon? They seem to think that I may do
something abrupt, without giving fair notice. Perhaps I
had better be thinking of how to sing Niinc Dimittis. Any-
how mine eyes have seen this victory— a great beginning if
only we can keep clean and not lose our aeads now. Would
my own part had been of more worth, but England, so far,
has not failed, nor you, nor Molly.”

Auberon saw that he must be dying The actual pangs
of dissolution could not have wrung fr )m the old stoic any
more importunate prayer that he might see his son at his
death.

BOOK EIGHT

CHAPTER XXVI

I

P EACE, perfect peace, was said to be in the making,
somewhere or other, when Auberon saw Molly next,
the day before their father and guardian was buried.
The physical war had been over for nearly four months;
Auberon was a civilian again, released for good from the
feeling of walking the streets naked — for so it felt to wear
the uniform of those days, plastered with wound stripes,
years-of-service stripes, badges and ribbons — a personal his-
tory for the public to read.

He had acquired, besides, a new ^rm which aped with
immense success the gestures of flesh-and-blood arms. He
had been fairly driven to this. He had entered Brussels,
upon his usual business, the day the Germans cleared out,
and in the Place St. Gudule a Belgian lady of rank had flung
her arms round his neck, at sight of his flapping sleeve, and
had kissed him with tears. He had felt thenceforward that
something would have to be done as soon as he could find
time to go shopping. So now he had this wonderful toy
arm; no one would notice now his little deficiency.

As soon as her nursing was over, Molly had taken some
“welfare” job with our troops occupying Cologne: only
by special leave was she at home to-day, for to-morrow’s
funeral. Auberon met her train at Victoria. In the
station he glanced many times at her face with covert
anxiety. Then he said to himself, “ She’s safe.” No doubt,
he thought, she was hungry at heart; probably she was
feeling that nothing could ever be any good, any more; but
there was no trace of wildness about her, of giving-in or of
self-pity; she was as simple as water when it is so transparent
that, for very dearness, you can’t guess its depth.

364

BOOK EIGHT

365

II

After tea on the day she arrived they sat on the big
window-seat of the drawing-room, over the Chantry garden
where yellow crocuses were brightening their little flames
as the March sunlight subsided. Aul^ron looked out at
them ruefully. “ No more Chantry tor us, I’m afraid.”
He told her why. As each year of ^he war had begun,
his father had stealthily sent in to the I xchequer a tenth of
the capital value of everything that he had possessed when it
began. So five- tenths were gone; and on what remained
the Chantry could not be kept going.

“ You knew,” Molly asked, “ at the time? ” But really
she knew there was no need to ask: Thomas Garth would
not have kept his son out of a share in the seemly use of
what belonged, in a sense, to them both.

“ You needn’t talk,” he said. “ Look at the mess that
you’ve made of New Hall.”

The big mean house was in sight at the far end of the
forest glade that had the river flowing down it. Many
little blobs of hospital blue uniform were visible, crawling or
pottering about the vulgar mansion in the last sunshine.

“ It was of no use to me,” she said with evident sincerity.
“ The rest of us gave things we could spare; your father
gave what he couldn’t.”

That was true, Auberon knew. He could scarcely
imagine his father living anywhere but here. With his
forehead pressed against the cold glass of the window Auberon
•gazed again at the garden and the river. Could any one
ever love them — every look and every mood of them — so
immensely as the passionately self-contained man who now
lay in the room overhead with nothing to see or to contain?
Things were only as precious as one’s own power of prizing
thein caused them to be; their lustre came out of their

366 ROUGH JUSTICE

lover’s eyes and they were beautiful or dull in much the
same measure as Jie was puissant or puny. “ Yes,” Auberon
muttered, “ he toed the line, right enough.”

One bad habit of peace is often thrown off in war. People
learn to take the death of their triends as simply as may be:
there is no time in a battle to force up high notes of sorrow.
You blow the froth off the cup of grief and drink the bitter
stuff undoctored. So Auberon and Molly now recalled in
their everyday voices the ways of Thomas Garth, each
wondering to find that what had fixed itself most in his or
her mind was lodged equally fast in the other’s; how quick
he was, in talk, to befriend any one bashful or disconcerted;
and slow to give people up as quite empty or dull, however
poor a figure they might cut at first; but always a little
uneasy, before the war came, for his inviolate darling,
England. “ Too many passengers; too little crew ! ” Each
of them could remember his saying it more than once, and
how, when the smash came, the words had set each of them
longing for fitness to man a capstan or haul on a rope.

“ That and ,” Auberon was beginning, in the great stir

of admiration that rose in him now; and then he pulled up
on the point of speaking of Victor’s winged words in the
August night, with the bats whirling and tumbling over the
garden. In headlong flight from the perilous topic he
plunged at any other he could find and stumbled clumsily
into making a kind of rough count of their losses in the last
four years — father and Bert and a cousin or two and all
Number One Section, and many good men from the village,
and school friends or their brothers and husbands. The more ‘
they lengthened the list the stronger grew the contrast
between the slightness of their ties with some of the ones
mentioned last and the poignancy of the one persistent
omission. Auberon could not help it: he did not dare
mention the name; Heaven knew what straight, smashing

BOOK EIGHT

3^7

question Molly might ask if he did. Kut soon he felt that
Molly was being as careful as he; she, like him, was trying
to steer their talk away from any currer t that might bring it
round to Victor. So, for the moment, this agreed suppres-
sion of a common thought widened again the distance between
their minds, which their uttered memor es of Thomas Garth
had been bringing closer to each other. No talk will flow
when the talkers’ first purpose is to ket p something unsaid.
They went to bed early on this night of reunion so often, on
Auberon’s part, thought of and longed for: at least, they went
to their several rooms, each, no doubt, co turn out and look
over, as well as might be, the broken sticks that seemed to
remain of the furniture of their youth.

Ill

The judgement of God, expressed in terms so drastic as
gout and neuritis, kept Lord Wynnant away from the funeral.
Colin, however, was there: like a good-natured son he took
mental notes of whatever might soothe his father’s couch of
pain when related, with any advisable improvements, next
day. Both had probably liked the Garths as warmly as they
could like anybody on earth. But humours are to the
humorous-hearted: even in the very temple of sorrow,
comedy maintained, for these devotees of her cult, a prac-
ticable shrine.

It had been the oddest company beside the grave, Colin
said. “ No corpse but one could have joined together
for half an hour so many whom God had put asunder —
*Wade and Roads, the rival ventriloquists; Claude and me;
smug old campaigners like Ducat and pukka children of
light like Auberon and Molly. The Old Stone Man
was just like the sun — didn’t choose his friends at all —
simply shone on the just and the unjust, whichever was
there/’

368 ROUGH JUSTICE

Ducat and Mrs. Barbason had met, so Colin reported, for
the first time. “ They got on famously together — acres of
common ground, but charity to the dead was the pick of it.
Ducat can’t forget, though he forgives. ‘ Shadows we are
and shadows we pursue,’ he said to the Gorgonic Barbason,
with that damned elegant sadness of his. ‘ Had poor Garth
used all his gifts, he might have died Premier.’ The Gorgon
wasn’t doing anything in shadows. ‘ Want of balance,’ she
bawled. ‘ That was the trouble. He always let his notions
run away with him.’ ”

Wynnant drank it in. It was good for his gout.

Claude and Colin had come in uniform, each of their
bosoms ablaze with a polychromatic collection of ribbons
dazzling to any eye that knew only the unadorned tunics
visible in the trenches.* “ We braves,” Colin truthfully said,
“ created a sensation the most profound, a sentiment the most
respectful.”

Wynnant grinned. “ The two best embosked emhusquis
in Europe! ”

“ Absolutely! ” said Colin. “ And not a word of credit
for our genuine qualities. That parson who ran the show

yesterday ! W ell, seriously the Church of England ought

to set her house in order. This blaspheming divine said that
there were amongst us to-day ” — Colin’s voice assumed by
degrees the hollow boom of one kind of bad preaching —
“ the bravest of the brave, men brow-bound with the Roman
oak, men whom many Kings had delighted to honour, and
yet he — the padre, you know — would venture to say that,
even in such lives of peace as our departed friend’s, something*
of courage akin in spirit to that of the bravest might be
practised, some labour accomplished, some victory won — you
know the sort of cadenza,'*

Oh, yes, Wynnant knew every inflection of bunkum.
The picture of Thomas Garth walking, some distance behind,

BOOK EIGHT 369

in the heroic footsteps of Colin and Clai.de, was good invalid
food for him.

Colin seemed to have heard treasurabh words from half the
mourners. Wade had been pining alo id for the old party
business to get back into its swing: foc:ball and racing had
started again; why not faction fightir g? “ But Roads,”
Colin said, “ is, in my nostrils, even me -e niffy than Wade.
The dirty dog is e’en nosing round, about Victor Nevin, you
know. He tried to pump me in the ch arch yard. He’ll be
working up one of his stunts — ‘ A Tragedy of the War’
perhaps — some sort of fetid sob-story to go with the sludge in
that Sunday paper of his.”

“ Does any one not know about Nevin.? ”

“ About a million people knew in F ranee — and they’re
keeping their mouths shut like good uns.”

“ The Nevins must know.”

‘‘ I think so. None of them showed yesterday, except
Joyce. She had a thick veil and sat right at the back. She
must have slipped in after every one else and she bolted away
at the end lest people should speak to her. She almost ran
down the path from the church — she stumbled on something
— because of the veil, I suppose — and went down on one
knee and then picked herself up and rushed on, to get away
from us all. I tell you, she was tragic.”

“ Yes.” Wynnant took in this vision of Joyce in no
unsympathetic way. For of tragedy he was a connoisseur
too. “ And what,” he presently asked, “ about the Huntress
Diana.? ”

“ Molly.? Can’t tell a bit. She knows that Victor cut it
Whether she knows he’s dead I can’t even guess. These
enormous things happen to Molly and she just closes over
them like a sea.”

“Yes. She’s like them all. She has containment”
Wynnant paused, to make faces, the pains of hell stinging his

370 ROUGH JUSTICE

limbs more sharply than usual. As soon as this distraction
abated, his interest in drama was revived. “ Wasn’t she,”
he inquired, “ a bit of a toast in her time? ”

“ I believe you,” said Colin.

“Wasn’t Follett, the old satyr’s son, doing time of some
sort — the Jacob and Rachel business — for Molly’s beaux
yeuxi ”

“ Yes.”

“ And Claude, your twin brother in valour — didn^t he
cast an eye? ”

“ He ‘ also ran.’ He didn’t finish, though. He cut it
in the straight. I caught him looking at her in that church
with a kind of damned insolent pity. She’s down and he’s
up — she’s a sort of relict of some one who muddled his
running away, while Claude’s labelled ‘ Hero,’ all over his
thorax, for doing it neatly, like me. He’ll go somewhere
else, where he thinks he’ll do better.”

“ You’re mighty serious. Were you smitten, too? ”

“ Naturellement, Who wasn’t? I’ve scratched, though.
She can’t want another blue-funker. She’ll take the other
sort now.”

“ You mean ? ”

“ Whom but Auberon, the son of the morning, although
a slow starter? She mustn’t marry beneath her rank, and
there is no other man in it. I watched ’em yesterday. The
rest of us were apes with blue and red posteriors: those two
and old Garth in the oak box were the only three finished
humans. And humble, too, begad — they haven’t a notion
that it’s people like them who keep the earth going round
while the rest of us play dirty tricks. If they don’t rush
bang into each other’s arms, I shall have to make ’em.”

Wynnant listened composedly. He agreed, like some
gifted old art-dealing rogue who can appraise with an almost
noble rightness a grace quite foreign to himself when he

BOOK EIGHT

371

comes across it in some enskied Delhi Robbian Virgin or
blithe, wise saint of Mino da Fiesole. ‘‘ They’re England,
really, these Garths,” said Wynnant. “ The few that there
are of this sort, with no wit to speak of , and no measly fears
or desires — loving like spaniels and tao^ing their coats ever-
lastingly off to the first thing that has to be done — it’s only
they that keep on putting off from day to day the crumbling
away of the whole British outfit. T hey’ve won the war
and scored nothing by it but losses, and now they’ll just get
down to work, same as ever, next job to hand, and go on
preserving us gratis.”

Not once in his long career, I suppose, had Wynnant
faltered in the policy of grabbing at all he could get, sparing
himself any trouble that he could avoid, and letting his
country go to the dogs if that were its humour. But he
could tell a choice vintage, in wine or in man, the moment
he sniffed it — could do it even if that vintage was not then
the fashion and never likely to be it.

IV

The faintest flush of green was beginning to animate the
thorn hedge round the Chantry orchard on the last evening
but one before Molly should go back to her work at Cologne.
She and Bron were walking up and down there talking
business. How long, he asked, would her present job last?

She didn’t know — it was rather absurd — the way they
demobilised people; you might be called into an office some
day and told to be off the next morning,

“ And then? ” he asked.

“ I ^hall find work at home,” she said quickly. Any-
how there might be scrubbing to do at New Hall.”

“ Don’t live in that place,” he said. He could see her
under its high garden wall, with the old peer spewing his
filth and the maids grinning from the upper windows. He

372 ROUGH JUSTICE

knew that she had some money to live on — probably more
than he now.

She answered question with question. “ And what about
you? ”

He had a great plan, he said. He was to stand in with
an old fellow - corporal. Brunt, in business. Brunt was
starting a brick-kiln up in the north, to make bricks for the
thousands of houses that would be wanted now, with half
the troops coming home to be married. Brunt had been a
brick-maker’s foreman before the war — a, tremendously
practical man.

Molly was eager to hear. “ What sort of place was it ?
Jolly? ”

“ It’s striking,” he said. “ A ‘ black country,’ you know.
It looks a bit shelled. They’ve hoicked most of the bowels
out of the earth and left them lying about on the top, with
smuts falling on them. Then it rains and makes little
trickles of cleanness down the slopes of this muck — like a
stoker’s face if he cried. It’s all rather nice and front-
liney.”

His journey north, to seal this partnership with Corporal
Brunt, had, in fact, done away with the notion, in Auberon’s
mind, that there ever was a time when England was not
fighting a life-or-death war against something which threat-
ened the precarious life of this odd island workshop. In
this more durable war the front line had looks that were
curiously like those of the other, by day and by night —
barrages of smoke and poisonous gas that rolled across blighted
Lancashire fields, flames from Midland furnace chimneys
that leapt and winked in the dark like the expanding and
contracting flashes of many guns on a horizon. He was
drawn to these newly discovered firing-lines where a shortage
of one hand need not utterly disqualify a man. To get a
niche there, to be an N.C.O. in that more regular army of

BOOK EIGHT

373

England’s defence, had lately become the thing supremely
worth doing; there was the centre cf things; the place
where the fun was; the only spot where you could feel you
belonged, just as it had been on Gistleiiam Ait before they
swam across and explored it. He had almost exactly the
old feeling now — that unless he coul 1 get at that place,
nothing might ever be any good any m* -re.

He told Molly so, with due pre autions against her
imagining that there was any sort of m* ^ral business about it,
any self-sacrifice rot. He was after the fun: that was all.
He grew so excited in telling her that he forgot for a moment
or two the guard on his tongue: he spoke in the old
pre-smash way, as if there were nothing that could not
be said.

She took it in with the same friendly gravity that had
made it easy, twenty years ago, to confide to her any wild
project of his. “ I think it’s a good plan,” she said, “ to
do some sort of work that’s quite plain, and live in a very
plain place and get right away from everything gaudy and
shiny — all the sort of things that used to seem ‘ brilliant ’
in the old make-believe time. Do you remember the last
day of it all? ”

“ Before the war came? ”

She nodded.

“ Don’t I ! ” he said. “ You came out through the house
to the lawn, with the news. I could hear your step, three
rooms away.”

“ Ah ! my old elephant tread.”

“ No — it was the whole world standing on its toes to
listen. ’ And then you came out at last — and even then I

didn’t see what it all meant till Victor explained ” It

was hopeless. Along whatever vista of the past he looked,
the figure of Victor stood at its far end. Auberon stopped.

But Molly looked straight at that unevadable figure.

374 ROUGH JUSTICE

“ Yes,” she said. How we listened, you and I! It set
me dreaming: that was all; just a luxurious dream of having
got into life’s very heart. But it set you to work — made
you rush off to do the next thing that had to be done, and
so you spoke to poor Bert and then I spoke to Victor and he
was drawn in.”

“ Drawn! ”

“ You didn’t see? ”

“ What? ”

“ Didn’t you hear me crying like a fool that night, very
late, up in my room? I thought you must have heard, you
spoke so kindly.”

“ I heard, all right.”

“ You didn’t guess why I did it ? ” •

** I guessed you thought Vick would be killed.”

“In action? Cry for fear of that! ”

He swallowed the little rebuke; he should have known
her pride better.

She relented. “ It wasn’t your fault,” she said. “ You
couldn’t know — Victor and I were alone when it ended.”

“ What ended? ”

“ Victor — and all the lovely dreaming. I told him how
you had turned his brave words into action. I was sure he’d
exult. But it only took him aback. It was as if we had
played a trick on him — tripped him up over some little slip
he had made.”

“ My God! He mmt have meant it, Molly.”

“ Not the way that your father and you mean things you
say. He meant it — just as so many beautiful words, to
make a few moments feel beautiful — not to get people to do
things.”

“ He tackled the job, though,” said Auberon doggedly.

“ Oh, he went with you — yes. But it wasn’t his act.
He was like a poor thing in a trap — he couldn’t get out.

BOOK EIGHT

37S

And then it all came again — there was a trap again and he
couldn’t get out. You knew? ”

“ Y es,” he confessed, out of hand. “ I knew, Molly,
and I never tried to get him out. Somciow I never thought
of it. But Colin tried.”

“So did I — in a way. But it wa> no good — no one
could get him out then — there was nothing left that he
could get out to.”

“ You know that he’s dead? ” Aub( ron asked, urged by
some dim impulse to have done with a 1 lying now, uttered
or silent.

“ Yes,” she said. “ I almost knew the hour. It was in
every one’s face. And then Joyce wrote me a letter, a
generous, splendid letter. I think Joyce must be one of
the noblest persons left in the world.” Of a sudden she
looked at him sharply. “ You didn’t hear,” she asked,
“ anything — anything special — ^about Victor’s death? ”

He went back on his impulse and lied stoutly. “ No! ”

She seemed to suspect him. “ Don’t think,” she said,
“ that things have to be ‘ broken ’ to me. I’m not newly
widowed. Victor had given me up long ago.”

Auberon’s eyes, somehow, looked at the ground without
his willing it, as though all men were shamed by that failure
of one luckless brother. “ I had been failing him, too,”
she went on, “ since that night. Of course I couldn’t
break with him. A woman must often find out, after she’s
married, that some one is not quite what she had thought.
But of course she mustn’t cry off. It would be like throw-
ing a husband over because he turned out to be poor — and
it can’t, become fair because one is only engaged and not
married. Besides, it had all been my fault — I had expected
impossible things.”

She had flushed as she spoke, and she had spoken more
and more eagerly. It was as if there were something she

376 ROUGH JUSTICE

had to put right, whatever the effort it cost — ^as if she were
feeling that their previous silence stood in the way of some-
thing that must be done or released — he could not tell what
and he did not know what to say. All he could think of
doing just then was to put his arm through hers and press
hers hard against his side — the friendly way that he had
always had of communing with Molly in their younger days
when the joy of their comradeship was big but inarticulate
in them both — deep wanting to call unto deep but not quite
knowing how to do it. Then they walked for a long time
among the big apple-trees so silently that you might almost
have fancied you heard the new sap of the year rising and
pushing its way in every stem and twig round them.

CHAPTER XXVU

1

1 UNCHEON next day, the last wl ole day of all, was a
lamentable meal. Auberon was destitute of skill in
-J dissembling regrets: with almosr comical dismay he
felt the minutes of Molly’s stay at the Chantry sliding
uncontrollably away. Molly’s femini^ie impulse to keep
an emotional situation well in hand made her raise many
trivial topics. But they were absurdlv^ too little really to
fill the places of the things that were too big to be mentioned.
And Auberon was wooden and absent, and so all Molly’s
small safety topics wilted away and they both sat silent and
troubled, at the meal’s end, till they rose slowly and stood
looking out of the big door-window to the garden.

“ Flood,” he said, as his old custom was of noting these
things. The river lay dead low, but a delicate change in its
surface texture showed that a young tide was just beginning
its insurrection against the weak stream. “ Molly,” he said
abruptly, “ we can’t go on like this. We must do something.”
“ Yes,” she said.

“ Coming out in the punt? ”

“ Yes.”

Out of doors it was better. The full breath of spring
was not yet in the air, but something else was abroad — ^a
kind of whisper that spring was on the way. The young
tide, too, was getting the use of its strength when they
manned the punt: tiny trickles of water were rushing about
over level patches of foreshore, capturing little hollows and
dodging round pebbles with an air of freakish boldness.

The two said nothing more while they worked down
Gistleham Reach close to the bank, stemming the weak tide
now, so as to ride up lightly on it presently when it should
have gathered force. But it was better, Auberon felt, to be

377

378 ROUGH JUSTICE

here, and to have something to do — if only trying to punt
with one arm, and a curious tool in place of the other. It
un-numbed your mind. You could think, anyhow.

No other reach of the Thames below Windsor is quite so
lonely, on most days of the year, as that which they were
now descending. One or two other reaches may look as if
no one had ever frequented them; this one has the strained
solitude of a place once full of stir, but now derelict: “ How
doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! How is
she become as a widow ! ” Half a mile off, at the far end
of the reach, the vista was crossed, very slowly, by the old
ford ferryman’s boat: he dipped his sculls with an incredible
slowness; like a little figure in some Turner landscape he
seemed to sum up the spirit of all this faint pageant of
sunken warmth and spent energies.

Auberon had always felt, in an inarticulate way, that
quality in the scene. In old days before the war its
melancholy would only brace his high spirits the higher as
indoor fires are urged on to burn more brightly by frost and
wind out of doors. But now the place had changed; the
five war years had deepened its solitude; at Misery Point
the herons prosecuted their private affairs with an assurance
acquired while men had been too busy killing each other to
be a nuisance to birds. And he had changed too.

Not that he felt himself much weighed upon by the
pervasive expression or scent of many old and beautiful
things now abandoned and decomposing composedly. But
he did see, for the first time, that this was a possible way of
feeling the place; it was a pressure which some people
might have to resist; some might find it irresistible. And
then his mind settled on the thought of what Molly in
particular might feel if she were always to live in that place,
in that beastly New Hall, with her losses to count and with
life itself seeming, perhaps, like a thing that had once been

BOOK EIGHT

379

on the rise but had passed the top now. Unbearable thought!
With his one solid arm he drove his pole furiously into the
river’s gravelly bed till Molly swayed w th the forward leap
the punt gave.

II

Whatever your corrosive or fantastic. it ing cares may be,
and however short your allowance or limbs, good plain
physical labour soon begins to draw you jack towards simple
and happy consciousness of the body ind all its rightful
delights; the strong, sane sensuousness ( f unbedevilled early
youth returns upon you, weather-beaten adult as you are,
more or less; you walk again in the ways of your heart and
in the sight of your eyes. By the time they passed the
Chantry again, an hour later, speeding up river on the prime
of a rushing tide, both were flushed and breathing deeply;
Auberon’s big right fore-arm was looking enormous with
the blood surging in every vein and with all its working
thongs and swells of muscle in full animation: the Huntress
Diana was warmed as it might have been with a rattling run
through the forest; she panted a little, her deep bosom rising
and failing sharply and her face unashamedly beaded as
any June morning rose with the dew of Nature in full
health.

Auberon marvelled. “ And some women cover their
faces with flour,” he thought, “ lest they look as glorious as
that!” Aloud he said, “Rest — my old limbs must have
rest.” A cunning impulse, coming Heaven knows whence
and not understood by himself, had invaded him. He had a
plan.

And, strangely, she was like one who knew it. “ Oh,
rubbish! ” she said, gaily, but hastily too, as if she countered
instinctively some move instinctively divined.

“ A breather, then, at least,” he pleaded. “ The only
place for it, in this mountain torrent, is ”

38 o rough justice

“ Home, I suppose,” she said, in that hurried way. They
had just passed the garden.

“ No! The old pond.” A deep narrow ditch, now filled
by the tide, cut Gistleham Ait into two. Out of this cutting
again, at its middle, another narrow channel diverged at right
angles; this ran for some twenty yards into the osier-grown
lower half of the Ait and then opened out into a round pond,
a little lake lost in the midst of the jungly island. Few
people knew that this lakelet existed; scarcely any, except
Molly and Auberon, knew that after half-tide it could be
entered by boat.

She said “ Oh I ” not exactly resisting — more like one who
only takes note, with a deep disturbance of heart, that a tide
has set in which may carry far. Already he was swinging
the punt’s bow round the sharp corner into the cutting.

Out of the hustling main current, the craft moved slowly
along the little waterway that fitted it almost like a sheath.
The gunwales rubbed against the rank grass on both banks.
Once the two had to stoop, to pass clear under a great branch
let down by a tree: Molly shipped her pole at that point and
did not unship it again; she stood at her end of the punt,
passive and waiting, as if, in some curious way, it were not
for her to push on with this thing.

That struck him. He could not quite tell how it struck
him nor how it bore on his plan — whatever his plan was, for
even now he did not see his way clear, nor to what it was
leading, but only knew that he must go on and find out and
have a kind of recklessness and unreason. He was not sure
what kind of recklessness — ^an active plunge, a taking of
risks, or just letting himself be led on and on by the impalpable
hand that was holding his and prompting each movement he
made. He looked at Molly almost all the time he was
pressing the punt along the little channel to where it widened
only just enough for the punt to scramble round the corner

BOOK EIGHT 381

into the final cutting and the little land-locked haven at
its end.

While he looked at Molly there came a sensation akin, as it
seemed, to one that he had felt long ago v hen rowing in close
races: every sense had acquired then a j^trange exaltation of
its powers; he had smelt flowers far off in the fields; he could
pick out the voice of each of his friends fr nm the joint roar of
all Skimmery running and shouting on the bank. With some
such consciousness of a release from thr common limits of
perception he saw suddenly and exultantly that Molly was
agitated : her eyes flickered; they flinched away from his as
they had never done in all the years of her elder-sisterly
beneficence to him when, more than anything else, their
untroubled kindness had denied all hope to his hidden love.
She had always been generous, but since the hideous scene at
New Hall she had seemed as remote and contained as a star,
that gives all it can and takes nothing and is never in need of
you or disturbed by you. But now .

Ill

The punt was in the little lake by now; it rode idle, almost
at rest, with a tiny ripple subsiding under its bows. Molly
had sat down on the rising floor at her end and Auberon was
just about to sit at his, in their old fashion, when she quickly
moved a little to one side and pointed to the vacant space
beside her. She did it as if some force resisting within her
had first to be overcome with an effort.

He came at the call and sat down, a foot from her. And
then it seemed almost as if she did not know what to do with
him there, for she looked straight in front of her, over the
other end of the punt, though there was nothing out there to
see except the low jungle of osiers. Without knowing what
to say next, he called her name softly, merely asking her to
look his way.

382 ROUGH JUSTICE

She glanced round at his eager face for a moment and then
away, and then again her eyes wavered back to him and away,
like the head of some gentle wild creature that wants to come
but is still half afraid when you call to it. Right and left she
looked away, but always less far than the time before; like a
compass needle oscillating to rest on its mark, her eyes settled
in upon his and stayed there.

At that surrender he knew less than ever what he should
say; the only thing he was prompted to do was to seize a wet
hand of Molly’s, kiss it a great many times and fondle it with
his own and murmur, “My darling, it’s come, it’s come! ”
while she bent over the head that was bent down over her
hand and kissed the thick hair on its crown.

During the few seconds of that first ecstasy of their coming
home to each other, after all the travels of their hearts, they
carried on long conversations without a word more. As they
sat hand in hand and quite silent there flowed into Auberon’s
mind, as though through her fingers and his, a narrative of all
the changes she had suffered since their early comradeship lost
its simplicity; without speaking, she pleaded the pathlessness
of the wilds into which a girl has to turn out as she
grows beyond girlhood — all the lonely hopes and distrusts
and longings for something firm and secure — the
whole agitated and diffident world lying behind the
delusive rampart of Daphnean reserve and pride that may
look like a repelling chain of frozen Alps to an awed lover’s
eyes.

When thought emerged again into audible speech, they had
explained a good deal to each other, “ You see,” she said,
“I’m not fit for you, Bron. You should have "some one
better — only there’s no one could love you so much. I’d
begun dreaming about you while it was still wicked to do it —
before Victor died. I used to wake up and know I had found
out too late and could never be fit for you, and I’m not I’m

BOOK EIGHT 383

old and Fve made my mistake. I’m only something left over
out of a mess.”

They had stood up by now; so he could put his real arm
right round her magnificent shoulders and stem the flow of
nonsense at its source. She returned with a sort of humble
fervour the mighty hug of the Adam-IiM.;e lover whose whole
and unwasted estate of passion was still is to bring to a bride.
So the two unconscious emblems of all tl at had saved England
in war and had now to save her in peace stood enlaced, each of
them freed at last from every care but the fear of not being
worthy of the other.

THE END

PrinUd in Greai Britain ^ R. R. Ci.aric, Limitki), Edinb'u?-gh.